Star Trek: Start to Finish

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Memory Alpha) is the funny one. Where they go back in time. With the whales. Where Scotty says “hello, computer” into the mouse.

And it’s great. It is legitimately fantastically good. It manages to take a plot about extinction and make it light and interesting and a little bit alarming without bludgeoning you with the message. It manages to be an adventure movie without violence. It takes characters that by all accounts should be worn through and makes us interested because there’ in such a radically different environment.

But let’s stop a moment and realize that it manages to do all this because it is running the same plays, cleverly disguised so you don’t notice. Oh, you went back in time to the ‘present’ and found a nearly-extinct species because a mysterious probe (or is it a big mysterious probe) is threatening to destroy all you hold dear? Oh no!

The trick is that none of that matters, because they pull off mixing and matching so many ideas with the connective tissue of being damn hilarious. At some point it was decided that this movie would allow the occasional bits of humor found in most Trek to range freely, and the freewheeling antics of all the characters allowed to speak their minds and interact in this new way is so magical that you can forgive the movie its shortcomings.

Even if these sins are forgiven, though, let’s list them for completeness sake. The size of the Bird of Prey shifts from being rather claustrophobic to easily fitting two humpbacks and no one notices. Saavik is even more wooden in this movie than the last, which is a neat trick since she’s barely on screen. Scotty actually says (I swear!) “Captain, there be whales here!” in a giddy little burst. Some of the whale reaction shots linger far too long. Last, everyone wears 80s clothes, which I suppose is understandable, but I’m only barely able to forgive it.

The actors are given some new character opportunities to play with, too. Kirk interacts with a woman but doesn’t try to seduce her. Spock is remembering how to be himself, even as that self is shifting in new environs. McCoy gets to fully commit to his role as ship conscience, wandering about making sure people do what they need to do. Scotty is free of the lower decks, finding the materials he needs to make everything everyone else does possible. And Chekov shines as the suspected spy without a clue about what he did wrong.

On the larger scale, the look of this movie is a little harder to pin down. It lacks the visual flair that Search had, where it was obvious that Nimoy was relishing the look of the scene, the framing of the shot; Voyage is much more utilitarian. The computer-generated images in the dream sequence also seem out of place; they have nothing about them that’s interesting other than their existence, which in 1986 was probably enough. Lastly, the swoopy letters are back, albeit in a less swoop-tastic form.

This movie also continues the trend of better defining the universe; we finally see that the Federation has a President and a whole hall-ful of well-costumed ambassadors, filling in the until-now-murky political aspects. We see our first black, female captain aboard the Saratoga (which, unfortunately, is fried by the probe). And we see the Federation’s nonviolence played out in a real but unspoken way throughout the movie.

The nonviolence plays on multiple levels. Easiest to see is that there is simply no fighting; Chekov failing to use a phaser on stun is as close as we come. There is some slapstick chasing, and the threat of force, but we see how solutions can be reached without resorting to the “easy” way. This contrasts nicely with Kirk’s warning at the beginning as the Bird of Prey flies toward Earth: “This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture.”

That line is the summation of the movie. In the best Trek tradition, the movie is making its point by holding up the mirror and letting the audience see for themselves what is wrong. This movie is so confident that this trick will work– and it does, and it has, and it will in many more movies– that they can step up and call their audience out on what’s wrong, and know that the audience will spend one minute laughing, then the whole evening understanding that they were the butt of the joke, then a good long time wondering if they want to be.

That’s what Trek has always done so well, and pairing it with a healthy dose of humor makes it incredibly fun to watch.

Grade

A; a departure from the typical, but incredibly well done

All Our Yesterdays

All Our Yesterdays (Netflix; Memory Alpha) finds the crew of our favorite starship beaming down to a planet whose star is about to nova and whose inhabitants have vanished. There, in a library, they find an old man who seems to teleport around the room. As one does.

It quickly becomes apparent that the people of the Sarpeidon have invented a time travel device they call the Atavachron. They’ve used it to travel back in time to escape the impending nova, and are all hiding out in the past. Leaving aside the inherent problems with changing the past and just plain fitting that many people into the population of the past (language barrier?), this makes for a very neat little plot device.

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Kirk gets separated and does a little jail time, but this is a Spock-and-Bones episode. Those two get transported into a desolate ice age and meet the lovely Zarabeth, who has been exiled there. Spock succumbs to despair (emotion!) and falls for Zarabeth (she is pretty hot), but Bones keeps up the fight and they all get home alright.

There’s some silliness in Spock “reverting” to his ancestral ways thrown in there that’s a little hand-wavy (he wasn’t Prepared; why should he be changed?), but if you can ignore that this is a great twist: it gives Bones a leading role (he’s so often the comic relief or the doomsayer), while putting Spock into a position where Nimoy can do some acting and flex the character in new ways.

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I liked this episode a ton. There’s a few great scenes and a few great lines, there’s an interesting set up and a good delivery of it, and there’s enough sideline mysteries that you’re left wondering a bit at the end.

Best Bit of Dialog

Kirk: Spock, are you in the library?
Spock: Indeed not; we are in a wilderness of arctic characteristics.
Bones: He means it’s cold!

Grade

B+; would be higher if not for the slight hand-waving all over the plot.

Assignment: Earth

Assignment: Earth (HD Video; Memory Alpha) starts with the Enterprise in 1968 to conduct historical research. No extraordinary circumstances; they’re just there. Or then, I guess. Time travel being new and interesting is so last season.

But oh no! Someone is beaming onto the Enterprise from a thousand light years away! What the heck!?!

Oh, it’s a guy and a cat. They can’t be all that bad. And “Gary Seven” just wants to go down to Earth and make sure everything turns out like our favorite starship crew remembers it. But how can the crew be so sure that he’s not trying to muck up history? (why the heck are they there, again?)

The rest of the episode involves the crew trying to decide if Gary Seven is a good guy trying to help the Earth or a bad guy trying to screw things up. The audience, though, is almost immediately told that he’s a good guy.

That’s a mistake when you’re viewing this as an episode of Star Trek; the tension would be more interesting if you weren’t told. But this is only nominally an episode of Star Trek; this is really the pilot for another show about the mysterious Mr. Seven and his spunky twenty-year-old secretary, and the Enterprise crew is largely relegated to reacting as those two do the interesting parts of the episode.

And I’ve got to say, Gary Seven would have been a pretty neat show. Gary is a good leading man and has a lot of moves that make him fun to watch. The spunky secretary is a bit of an overdone trope but isn’t played too far here; her primary role is as exasperated modern and she does that well.

The show has a heavy dose of Trek (pacifism; utopianism; light humor) but has some decidedly un-Trek aspects: Gary’s computer isn’t cooperative and gives him guff when he’s terse; Gary has no problem lying and sneaking around; the secretary actually wears clothes.

Overall, it’s a good episode, but not great. I’m a little sad the spinoff never went anywhere (at least in the canon).

Grade as Star Trek

B+

Grade as Pilot

A

The City on the Edge of Forever

The City on the Edge of Forever (Memory Alpha; SD Video) has been one of the episodes that I’ve been looking forward to: it won a Hugo, and it’s got a little hype in the air.

It lives up to it.

The Enterprise is mapping out some temporal disturbances when McCoy accidentally overdoses on cordrazine and goes super-crazy paranoid. McCoy beams down to the planet that is the source of the disturbances and an away team follows. On the planet is the Guardian of Forever, that big oddly-shaped circle thing. It’s the cause of the disturbances.

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McCoy, trying to escape from the away team for fear that they’ll kill him (paranoid delusions!) jumps through. The Guardian breaks the news to the away team:

The Guardian of Forever: Your vessel, your beginning, all that you knew… is gone.
Kirk: McCoy… has somehow… changed history.
Scotty: You mean we’re stranded down here?
Spock: With no past, no future.
Uhura: Captain, I’m frightened.

Really, Uhura? Nice way to speak the subtext, there.

So Kirk and Spock have to jump back in time and right history. They find the pivot point, and it’s a dreamer named Edith Keeler, whom Kirk promptly and inconveniently falls in love with. But to right the timeline, she must die.

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This really is a great episode. It’s got humor, it’s got conflict of interest, and you really do care for the characters. Sure, Kirk overacts a ton on some parts, and as always the sets and costumes are sad by today’s standards, but the story is good and incredibly rich; this episode has no problem filling out it’s time allotment (and Ellison wanted a B plot!).

And of course, McCoy gets the good lines:

McCoy: I am Leonard H. McCoy, Senior Medical Officer aboard the U S S Enterprise.
Edith: I don’t mean to disbelieve you, but that’s hardly a navy uniform.
McCoy: Quite all right. That’s quite all right, dear. Because I don’t believe in you, either.

But the power of this episode is the moral calculus it imposes on the characters. Is the price for righting the timeline worth it? Are untold millions of people lay in the future, do they have the same moral weight as the people around you right now?

What I would have liked to see was a bit more discussion about this. Instead, we just get anguish. That’s totally correct, but it’s only the half of the story that comes after the decision; the lead-in is just as important.

In any case, this episode deserves all the accolades it’s garnished, and I’m not about to withhold my own meager addition.

Grade

A+

The Alternative Factor

The Alternative Factor (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is really bad. Above an uninhabited world, the Enterprise suddenly sees the entire universe vanish for a split second, and then reappear. Perhaps the just-materialized man on the planet below knows what’s going on?

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Lazarus knows, but he’s not telling. He is, in fact, lying about it. And everyone knows it. But they don’t know what’s going on, and they can’t get him to tell them. So they wander around doing a lot of nothing for a very long time, until Lazarus makes his move and steals their dilithium crystals.

He needs them, you see, to jump across the barrier between this universe and the anti-matter universe, where his opposite awaits. Lazarus means to kill his opposite, knowing full well that it would be the end of everything.

No, that doesn’t make any sense. Neither does how they avoid it.

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It’s episodes like this that make Star Trek look bad. The plot is junk, and there really isn’t anything that happens in the middle half-hour of the show. Lazarus has a ridiculous fake beard. No one has anything to act with but surprise and frustration, and so the performances are terrible. The premise could be interesting, but they do nothing interesting with it. This episode is just really bad.

Which, since Conscience of the King was Ron Moore’s favorite and Devil in the Dark was Shatner’s favorite, probably means that this is some other luminary’s favorite episode of all time.

Grade

F

Tomorrow is Yesterday

Tomorrow is Yesterday (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is incredibly promising, but suffers by putting the crew into such a bad position that the way they get out of it has to be contrived and dumb.

This, as you can tell, is a time travel episode. The Enterprise accidentally slingshots around a “black star” and ends up in the 60s. There, they are spotted by Captain Christopher of the US Air Force, and they are forced to take him aboard.

Now they have two problems: how to get home, and how to get Captain Christopher back to Earth.

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The crux of the matter is that Christopher knows too much to go back to Earth, because his knowledge could change his future and the Enterprise’s past. Spock lays out the Temporal Prime Directive to back this up: you’ve got to keep the flow of time as it was.

But wait! Captain Christopher’s son will be a major figure! So Captain Christopher must go back. But before he does, the evidence of the Enterprise that he recorded on his plane must be destroyed. And the crew kind of botches that job. Badly. Now the whole security detail on base knows something is up.

But wait! Now Spock has figured out how to slingshot around the sun and return to Enterprise time. And as a bonus, you jump back before you jump forward, and if you transport people back into the spots where they were at the time they made important decisions the first time around, their situations will mysteriously be different this time around and they won’t have to make the decisions, because otherwise the plot falls apart.

This could have been a nice little episode where the crew is bad-ass and destroys the tapes (beam into the room, grab, beam out; stun anyone and everyone who gets anywhere near you) and transports Captain Christopher back after befriending him and convincing him not to talk. But instead it’s 75% of an awesome episode and some crap.

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With a lot of stock footage of air force planes taking off and flying about.

Starfleet or United Earth?

Starfleet is very definitely the people-in-charge of the Enterprise (we learn that the fleet has only twelve ships like her), but Starfleet is a part of (or maybe has a part called) the United Earth Space Probe Agency:

Captain Christopher: “Did the navy-“
Kirk: “We’re a combined agency. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency”
Captain Christopher:“United Earth?”

So now that the “Starfleet” term has begun to seek in, let’s start tracking when the “Federation” appears.

Grade

C+