Star Trek Nemesis (Star Trek X)

This is the tenth in a series of essays on the first ten Star Trek movies, comprising the Roddenberry-Berman era, and so completes the Trekalog.

Star Trek Nemesis, the tenth and, as it turned out, final feature film of the Roddenberry-Berman era, is by now a movie almost nobody likes.

That includes some of the people who made it. Patrick Stewart, who initially called it the best of the Next Generation movies, was subtly dissing the final cut during his promotional tour. He was later quoted as calling the film “pretty weak.”

Even while defending the movie, Rick Berman (producer and co-creator of the story, with John Logan and Brent Spiner) found ways to be softly cynical about it. Cast members were soon talking about tensions with the director on the set. (In her typically understated way, Marina Sirtis called him an idiot.)

From the beginning Nemesis got a mediocre response both critically and at the box office, and its reputation has not grown much in the years since. I saw Nemesis in a movie theatre on its first day of its general US release in 2002, and was more disappointed than not. I saw it again during its first run and then on DVD, and was even less enthused-- also dismayed and maybe a little angry at what increasingly looked like the last lost opportunity.  For there is now one undisputable fact: this was our last look at the Next Generation crew on the big movie screen.

More than 20 years later I’ve looked at it again a few times on DVD, and in some ways Nemesis is not a bad movie. The narrative is tight, with one thing leading to another, and every event contributes and pays off. It has the over-the-top villain and the big space battle that the loudest fans say they want. It includes incidents not seen before in a Star Trek movie: a shuttle careening through the interior of a starship, an android jumping through space from one ship to another, and the Enterprise ramming another starship, not to mention an attempted psychic rape.

And it certainly has a message, spelled out several times: to be human is to strive to be better than you are. It’s a classic, core Star Trek ideal, and one sorely needed in these times especially.

While its reputation was set a long time ago and people who haven’t seen it in years still hold to the same opinion, I have to admit that even after seeing it again—without the same emotional baggage—I still don’t feel it. It still doesn’t land. And I have some idea of why for me it doesn’t.

There was an unusually long delay after the ninth Star Trek film. According to Rick Berman, Paramount wanted a new and younger crew for the tenth theatrical feature. Berman pointed out that a new crew had just been introduced on television in Star Trek: Enterprise, and another set of unfamiliar characters might be too much. The studio eventually agreed, perhaps grudgingly. The Next Generation and the Enterprise-E would get another voyage.

Meanwhile, actor Brent Spiner (TNG’s Data) and screenwriter John Logan were talking out ideas for the next Next Generation movie. Logan had been a Star Trek fan since childhood, inhabiting the Enterprise and Star Trek stories as he and his family moved from place to place.

By this time John Logan was riding high as a screenwriter for Gladiator, a box office and critical hit that won the Oscar for Best Picture of the year 2000. (In fact he was one of three named writers of that film--he reportedly wrote part of the second draft-- while its star Russell Crowe claimed the script was incomplete and arrived on set in sections, with lots of improvisations ending up on screen.)

Logan’s status got Paramount’s attention, and he pitched his concepts to Rick Berman. Over the next year or so, Logan, Spiner and Berman continued to develop the story, while Logan wrote numerous drafts of the script.

Logan wanted a direct confrontation between Captain Picard and a major villain to be at the center of the story. In interviews he cited Khan in Star Trek II as the model. He wasn’t the last to do that, and as we know now, in 13 feature films, a single, larger than life villain has worked really well in a Star Trek movie exactly once: in Star Trek II.

He wanted the villain and hero to have a personal connection, as in Star Trek II. So eventually he made him a biological clone of Picard.

The first scene in Nemesis happens in the Senate of the Romulan Empire. The Praetor dismisses the proposal by someone named Shinzon, after which an innocuous box left on a table blossoms in a double helix of laser light, and everyone in the room turns to dust.

That Logan would select the Romulans as the focus for this film was predictable, since they are based on the same Roman Empire he wrote about in Gladiator. Like other stories about Rome from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar forward, that movie concerns internal power politics, treachery and murder. So does the opening of Nemesis. (How there can be an interstellar empire aping ancient Rome so closely has always been an embarrassing aspect of the Romulans, which is unfortunately emphasized in this film.) 

Like the hero of Gladiator, the villain of Nemesis is a former slave—this time from the enslaved world of Remus. (In the myth of Rome, the city was founded by the twins, Romulus and Remus.) But Shinzon is not Reman by birth—he is human, born in a test tube from the DNA of Jean-Luc Picard, meant to someday replace Picard where as a Romulan agent he could undermine Starfleet and the Federation.

As Shinzon tells Picard in their first private meeting, then the Romulan regime changed, the plan was dropped, and the very young Shinzon was abandoned to die in the dilithium mines of Remus. Instead he grew up to become a military leader in the Dominion Wars, helped by the Reman known as his Viceroy (played by Ron Perlman in heavy Nosferatu-alien makeup.  That is, the influential 1922 German expressionist vampire film of that title by F.W. Murnau, not of course the 2024 remake.) 

Before that however, we see the Enterprise crew celebrating the wedding of Will Riker and Deanna Troi in Riker’s native Alaska, after which the Enterprise is off to Troi’s Betazed for a wedding ceremony there. On the way, Geordi picks up a positronic signal on an obscure planet near the Romulan neutral zone, where pieces of a Data-like prototype, called B-4, are found and reassembled. (The sequence on this desert planet features a new ground vehicle—a kind of open-air, hyper-dune buggy-- in scenes that were subjected to mockery by some fans. In seeing it again, the more conspicuous challenge to credibility was that the planet’s pre-Warp aliens sped around in exactly the same kind of vehicle, right down to the goggles they all wore.)

So from here, the Data/B-4 pair is thematically linked to the Picard/Shinzon pair, although B-4 serves also as a plot device and a possible escape hatch when—is it possible to call this a spoiler after 20 years?--Data sacrifices his life.

Though Shinzon turns on the charm at first, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that his fearsome huge starship, the Scimitar, is a weapon generating something called thalaron radiation, and is bent on destroying all life on Earth. 

Though the plot turns out to be not much more than an Evil Twin story, cloning was a hot topic at the time Nemesis was made.

The first animal was successfully cloned in 1996 (a sheep named Dolly.) In 2000 the first “rough draft” of the human genome was produced. The next few years saw a race between a government project and a corporate project to finish the genome. In particular, Craig Vetter, who ran the corporate project, was often on television hyping the importance of the human genome. When completed, it would be the key to ending human diseases and improving human health and performance—and longevity.

Hyping the importance of the genome played into a kind of genetic determinism that was dominant in science and the popular mind. Richard Dawkins, in his classic The Selfish Gene and other works, championed the gene as the major if not sole determining factor in human evolution, in interaction with the environment. According to biologist E.O. Wilson, this was generally accepted until 2010. Other scientists began questioning it after that, seeing large roles for epigenetics (factors other than DNA), behavioral means and symbol-based means (language) in human evolution.

As scientists dug deeper into genomes, they realized that the existence of particular genes wasn’t enough in itself—some genes didn’t “express,” but were still passed down, with the potential to be turned on under unknown circumstances. In any event, once the human genome was sequenced it did advance the diagnosis and treatment of some diseases and conditions, but it turned out not to be the miracle panacea it was hyped to be.

Cloning was a bugaboo on Star Trek several times before, threatening a human’s sense of uniqueness and identity, as well as the threat of its “deep fake” capabilities to replace people, the intent of the Romulan plot. That, in turn, is a standard science fiction device in various permutations (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.)

Moreover, problems with animal cloning suggested that the process might not produce as exact a copy as in science fiction and the popular mind. Even twins with very nearly the same DNA are not completely identical or indistinguishable in all respects, even if they are raised together.

The movie plays with these themes of identity (Picard and Shinzon are “mirrors” of each other; Shinzon complains that he is the echo and Picard the voice, and so on) and the influences of environment (Shinzon says Picard would be the same evil genius he is if Picard had grown up in slavery, and Picard wonders if he’s right.)

But the idea that Shinzon and Picard have exactly the same perceptions and thought processes because of their genetic identity doesn't pass my smell test. It represents more disbelief than I could suspend.  I've known identical twins.  It doesn't work that way.   

There is another fatal flaw of credibility to the movie: that Shinzon is a clone of Picard is supposed to instantly create an intimate relationship based on their genes. But in the story, they are just meeting. They have no prior relationship in the real world, as (for example) Kirk and Khan did. From a dramatic point of view, the relationship is too abstract, and without content.

Shinzon is played by Tom Hardy, now a celebrated and accomplished actor, in an early role. He is supposed to be a younger version of Picard, although more physically battered by his hard life on Remus. Tom Hardy creates a character worthy of a Roman epic. But after seeing this movie a number of time over decades, I am still stopped by one impression: I do not for a moment feel, believe or accept that Shinzon is a clone of Picard.

Part of it may be the age difference, but the physical detail that often give credibility to a young actor being accepted as a child of an older actor—let alone a clone-- just isn’t there for me. Bald heads aren’t enough.  Rick Berman recognized this problem: Tom Hardy didn’t look like Patrick Stewart, “so that was kind of hard to buy,” he said later. “But we worked very hard.”

Moreover, while Hardy and Patrick Stewart act well in this film, their scenes together feel like they’re in different movies. (The two actors apparently had no contact beyond their scenes during the weeks of filming.) Hardy approaches Shinzon as a version of Ricardo Montelbam’s outsized performance of Khan, while Stewart is a much more subtle and understated Picard. (Picard in a scene with Beverly Crusher emphasizes that as a young man he was arrogant "and a damn fool" but that's not what I see Hardy playing.)  As contrasting characters of different ages that wouldn’t be a problem. But the continuing emphasis on the clone aspect changes that, at least as you watch it.

The Data/B-4 B story continues throughout the movie, but there’s no credibility problem there because Brent Spiner plays both roles, and B-4 is a less sophisticated prototype. As a perhaps unforeseen consequence, this is an obvious contrast to the not mirror-images of Picard and Shinzon.

There are other bothersome aspects to the story and the backstory. Reman society is not even suggested beyond a single dimension. Where for example are its women? How did a slave society produce a starship that dwarfs the Enterprise, with so much firepower that must require huge supplies of energy? Where the hell did thalaron radiation come from? Apart from the mind of a screenwriter.

And of course, Shinzon’s target is Earth. We won’t waste our heroes heroism on a distant planet with only a few inhabitants (as in Insurrection) or unknown alien planets (as in Generations). Earth is the biggest hot button, though it might have resonated specifically in 2002: filming had begun only weeks after 9/11, and America was feeling vulnerable. That and the subsequent War on Terror changed the direction of the Enterprise TV series and eventually all of Star Trek, from novels to almost everything that subsequently appeared on screen, right up to now. Nemesis was by no means the worst victim of this.

Logan did provide some hints to credible elements of Shinzon’s character and motivations. He was a human raised without other humans. In Picard he sought a family lineage he could feel. The idea of Shinzon regarding Picard as a father, and his pathological need as a young man to outdo him, to conquer him, can be found in the film, but not easily. His snarling assertion that by destroying Earth, he would be more famous for a longer time than Picard, is a motivation that could have been given greater prominence.

Shinzon is also fighting off death as a result of his cloning, so he attempts to kidnap Picard and drain his blood as a treatment for his genetic malady--so in the middle of this muddle it's a vampire movie after all.

If these weren’t enough, Shinzon is also lonely, and immediately attracted to the first human woman he sees, Counselor Troi. His attempts at forcible sexual contact through psychic means does pay off somewhat later as a plot device, but it leads to one of the most embarrassing scenes in all of Star Trek, in its only overt sex scene ever. (Logan told Marina Sirtis that he had a “purely professional crush” on Troi, but one wonders.)

In the end, even the core message (to be human is to strive to be better than you are) feels flat, probably because it was stated but not really dramatized. Picard pleaded with Shinzon to be better than he is, but Shinzon simply refused. In fact he did become more than he’d been, rising from a slave child to an emperor, with his own vision of greatness. The difference between what Picard and Data saw as basically choosing to emphasize one side of human nature—our “better angels” in the Lincoln formula made contemporary by Barack Obama—and what Shinzon did with his life was implied but not focused.

To further muddy that message, strict adherents of the selfish gene theory would likely be on Shinzon’s side: survival (or conquest) at all costs. This is a debate that goes back to Darwin and especially T.H. Huxley, who introduced ethics into the human evolutionary equation. But none of this is engaged by the references to the genes shared by Picard and his nemesis. It just becomes another in too many themes and currents. To be fair, the elements are there: nature, nurture and human choice. They’re just jumbled up.

So the story, which unfolds logically, is nevertheless so crowded that it erodes its own credibility while feeling rote and forced.

And then there is the production itself.

Nemesis went before the cameras in November 2001.  Besides a new screenwriter in fanboy John Logan, the director was also new to Star Trek, but Stuart Baird was not a fan. He knew little about Star Trek and specifically the TNG episodes and movies, and apparently made no effort to change that.  Baird was known mostly as a film editor, notably for the great 1979 Richard Donner film, Superman.

At the time Berman said that he selected Baird because he was impressed by his directorial feature, Executive Decision. But years later Berman admitted (as revealed in the second volume of The Fifty Year Mission by Altman and Gross) that he was instructed to hire Baird by Sherry Lansing, head of Paramount.

Still, the idea of bringing “fresh blood” (Berman’s words) to a Star Trek film was extended to the cinematographer. At first it seemed it would be Dante Spinotti, Italian-born veteran and innovator, that IMBD calls “one of the most appreciated cinematographers in Hollywood.” But in the end the job went to another Hollywood veteran, Jeffrey L. Kimball, known mostly for action films, including Mission Impossible II, which included Star Trek veterans Ronald Moore and Brannon Braga as two of the three writers.

I recall at the time that I for one longed for a different visual approach for this well-known Star Trek crew, so we could see them in a new way—something akin to the creativity directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks brought to their westerns, with cinematographers like Gregg Toland, Winton C. Hoch and Joe McDonald.

Seeing Nemesis on DVD recently I did notice some different framing and camera movements inside the Enterprise, but nothing really striking. Others have complained of the visual darkness and murky imagery.  Still, Ford and Hawks showed you can come up with memorable images in a movie that emphasizes action.

Some fans fault aspects of the production (and I tend to agree that the Romulan uniforms are comical) but for all the difficulties the Enterprise cast had with the director, they all managed to come through. For me the most discouraging aspect of production was what we didn’t see in the final film.

It quickly became known that some 45 or 50 minutes of Nemesis had been cut before theatrical showings. When the movie was released on home video in 2003 and then in the Special Edition two-disk set in 2005—which is the one I own— at least some of the deleted scenes were included in the otherwise lackluster special features.

Some were trimmed scenes (and the DVD only included one part of the wedding sequence that was cut—this time fortunately, for it was a well-acted but misguided scene with Wesley Crusher) but some full scenes are notable. The first is introduced by Patrick Stewart, who calls it “an important scene” between Picard and Data that early on set up major themes of the movie. (If memory serves, Stewart talked about this scene in a pre-release talk show appearance as well.)

There’s a useful scene in sick bay that gives the neglected Gates McFadden another moment, and allows Picard to bookend something he said to Shinzon when he asked if Picards were always warriors. “I think of myself as an explorer,” Picard replied. In this scene he recalls that when Charles Darwin went on his voyage of biological exploration, his ship sailed “without a single musket.” “That was another time,” Crusher says gently, pocketing a phaser. “How far we’ve come,” Picard replies, ruefully and pointedly.

The final cut includes one scene of group mourning for Data. Deleted was another scene—a very TNG scene-- in which Geordi and Worf are in Data’s quarters, examining and packing up what he left behind—and Data’s cat Spot adopts Worf.

But the most conspicuous loss is the scene that was supposed to end the movie. Its the last few moments on the Enterprise bridge for Riker, now leaving to become Captain of the Titan, and the introduction of the new First Officer with a Riker prank. Captain Picard gets a new command chair—with seatbelts. “It’s about time,” he says, and so say we all.

Then we see the movie end the way Star Trek films properly end: with the Enterprise warping into space, bound for where no one has gone before. Instead Nemesis ends with a shot of the Enterprise still in space dock, an unfortunate metaphor for the impact of this film.

J.M. Dillard’s novelization of Nemesis includes these deleted scenes in her narrative. The result is a more satisfying Star Trek story, especially since it exposes fewer of the story’s problems. But my response to the scenes as filmed and cut was that, not only would it have been a better movie with most of them included, but as scenes they were better than some that made the final cut.

All of these possible reasons for less than enthusiastic responses to Nemesis are responses to the movie itself, and so require that the movie be seen first. None of them explains the conspicuous mystery of the film’s relative failure to attract the usual proportion of fans to the opening weekend, so Nemesis was in some ways a failure before anyone had actually seen it.

When I began this series of posts on the first ten Star Trek movies (The Trekalog) way too long ago, I described a little of what it was like to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture in a movie theatre in 1979 with an early audience (as I did): the anticipation, the cheers as each major character was first seen—including the Enterprise. This set a pattern of long lines and enthusiastic fans to greet each new film’s first showings.

In December 2002, I saw the very first showing of Star Trek Nemesis at my local theatre in a far northern California college town. It was in the afternoon—not the midnight show that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets got in some places in November, or that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would have the very next weekend after Nemesis.

Besides me, there were all of four people in the seats when Nemesis began that afternoon, and when it ended. I knew two of them from seeing them around and exchanging greetings when we passed. One had a disability that isolated him (for awhile he had to wear something that made him look like that 22^nd century soldier in the TNG pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint,” which he no doubt realized.) The other was the most conspicuous cross-dresser in town. I note this not to disrespect them (quite the opposite), but to recognize that from first to last, Star Trek found some of its most fervently committed fans among such outsiders.  But on that afternoon, we were alone.

In terms of numbers in the seats, Star Trek Nemesis didn’t start out quite that badly across the country, but it was the first Star Trek movie not to win its opening weekend, and its direct competition wasn’t formidable. Eventually it would be one of the least popular of the Trekalog, and least liked by critics. But it was also somewhat mysteriously ignored even before anyone saw the actual movie.

“...nobody came to see it,” producer Rick Berman is quoted as saying in the second volume of The Fifty Year Mission by Altman and Gross. “It wasn’t even a question of not getting good reviews. Any Star Trek movie opened and it would have a huge opening weekend, but this one didn’t. Now, why? I understand and appreciate the criticism of the production or script, but to this day, I have some difficulty understanding why it met with such a poor reception.”

At the time, the most repeated reasons involved the competition from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and the “franchise fatigue” that seemed to contribute to the early demise of the “Star Trek: Enterprise” series on television a few years later. There was also a sense that Paramount essentially subverted this film with weak marketing and perhaps deliberately fateful placement in the release schedule. But by the time Nemesis got to the international market, that direct scheduling competition didn’t exist (as Berman also acknowledged), and the film didn’t do well there either.

All of that pertains mostly to the general public. Why didn’t the fans show up? A lot of the diehard fans probably did that first weekend, there just weren’t as many of them. Many who might have been Star Trek fans had perhaps moved on to other sagas. But there was also a new factor in fandom in 2002: the Star Trek fan sites and their “bulletin boards” (or BBS.)

The two big ones then were Star Trek Today (which went online in 1999) and TrekWeb (around the same time.) I was reading both of them in the pre-Nemesis period, and I was a BBS participant. Looking back, I’d say at least two trends still noticeable in fandom today more or less began then.

The first was increasingly fan attention to “the biz” aspects: movie and TV budgets, studio politics, etc. There were still threads in which participants discussed the deeper meaning of individual episodes or movies, both current and past, and why Star Trek spoke to them—something that I find is rare these days, if not quaint. But there was more and more talk of promotion budgets, movie grosses and TV ratings.

The second was a kind of negativity, a virtual competition for attention-getting nastiness and outrageous assertions. There was also a growing sector of far right fandom on the boards, very different from the fandom that attended conventions and still championed the Roddenberry ideals. (Star Wars also had such fans, who rooted for the Empire to win.)

The Internet had already become a source of early information about the films still in production, including posting the entire script of Star Trek: Insurrection before its release. But these new sites made such information and speculation even more widespread, so there were debates about scenes, characters and plot points expected in Nemesis well before anyone had seen a frame of the finished film.

Rumors about Nemesis— known at first as Star Trek X—began on this sites some three years before release. At various times the director was said to be Josh Whedon, Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton. Outlines of the actual Nemesis plot were known more than a year ahead.

There was a lot of sustained and insistent negativity not only about Nemesis but about Star Trek: Enterprise, and those in charge of Star Trek—Paramount as well as Rick Berman. Perhaps this somewhat represented the views of a more general public, or of many Star Trek fans. Or perhaps it represented the views of only certain fans—and certain kinds of fans—that found an outlet and identity on the BBS.

It wasn’t all negative. Though the negativity was my enduring impression, I actually kept some pages about Nemesis from these sites, and there was also positive sentiment—including a lot of anticipation for the film’s release. Still, the debates and the expectations—both positive and negative—went on for months before that release. Did the movie itself become irrelevant?

In any case, the tepid box office and general grousing response to Nemesis was part of a larger dissatisfaction. By 2004, Star Trek: Enterprise was getting a lot of grief on the fan sites, and UPN—Paramount’s ill-fated attempt to start a cable channel—moved it to Friday nights, the well-known graveyard of the original series Star Trek, in what would predictably turn out to be its final season.

I visited the Star Trek: Enterprise set that summer of 2004 as part of my New York Times article about the ongoing Farewell to Scotty convention and the talk that Star Trek was dying. At one point I was in the shotgun seat of one of the electric carts studio people used to travel across the Paramount lot. Manny Coto, that year’s new showrunner for Enterprise, was in the back seat. Our driver was careening around and had to make a sudden stop to avoid a collision. “I have never understood the human predilection,” said I, “for piloting vehicles at unsafe velocities.”

Manny Coto laughed. “So you’re a fan,” he said. I’d paraphrased Data’s line from Nemesis, as Captain Picard sped his ATV across an alien desert.

Now I realize this is the only line I even half-remember from this movie. Unlike just about any other Star Trek movie you can name, I can think of no memorable lines associated with memorable moments. And as DeForrest Kelley once sagely pointed out, Star Trek movies are made of special moments.

Coto was upbeat about Star Trek’s future that day. But for my article I spoke with Leonard Nimoy, LeVar Burton, Denise Crosby (whose second “Trekkies” film had just come out) and others, including writer Nick Sagan and the president of a large Star Trek fan organization, and they all said more or less the same thing: maybe it’s time to give Star Trek a rest. There had been two and sometime three series running simultaneously for years, and new movies every few years. There was a sense that both creators and audiences were exhausted and, if not oversaturated, at least no longer hungry for Star Trek stories.

My article quoted UPN’s president denying he would do what he soon did: cancel “Enterprise” after four seasons. Even afterwards Rick Berman was still insisting plans for the next movie were being discussed—not John Logan’s proposed story bringing the captains of the Roddenberry-Berman era together, but the approach Paramount had wanted before Nemesis: a brand new crew unrelated to the prior ones.

Soon that project was abandoned as well, Berman disappeared (as did UPN), and the people who had been making every aspect of Star Treks for a generation were scattered. The original Roddenberry lineage was effectively broken.

For years, fans mourned the loss of a better exit for the TNG crew than Nemesis. And then, nearly 20 years later it miraculously happened. The third season of the limited series Star Trek: Picard (ten episodes in the new world of streaming) reunited the crew—and the Enterprise D—in a new adventure. The magnificent seven all got their stories—including at long last Doctor Crusher. Since there were also links to a future (like the next generation of the Next Generation), fans were left wanting more. But if--as seems very likely-- it is the last we’ll see of the Next Generation, these episodes are a fitting end.

Strange Old Worlds

 On September 8, 1966 the first season of the Star Trek series began.  It explored strange new worlds in the galaxy of imagination as well as in television storytelling.  But 57 years later, I wonder if it is truly exploring anything more than its own mythology.  Star Trek today seems more and more to be about itself.

 The new Star Trek shows display excellent writing, acting, directing and visual effects.  It produces entertaining television. The current series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds seems to have tried to recapture that original innocence, with its premise, its stand-alone episodes and that thrilling variation on the original opening with updated imagery. But most episodes seem to explore mostly the styles of presenting the established (if visually updated) Star Trek universe—comedy, horror, mixing animation with live action, musical comedy.  Star Trek now seems to comments on itself more than any outside world, real or imagined, including the self-consciousness of Lower Decks.

 Discovery tried to push the envelope at times, and bravely explores diversity and the internal life of a starship in a different way, though its obsession with feelings feels excessive at times (in my weaker moments I’ve referred to Captain Burnham as Captain Emo.) While season 4 in particular pushed Star Trek forward, even in this series, Star Trek mythology generated lots of story.

 It’s not that these shows lack values or significant content. And it's not that decades and hundreds of Star Trek stories should be ignored. But maybe the emphasis seems different.  Strange new worlds aren't primary.  At best the new shows are about the characters and their relationships and interactions within the canonical Star Trek mythology.  They seem to be less about exploring the previously unknown, or involved with testing our assumptions against what is found out there.  Character-driven drama with technobabble is not all of what Star Trek started out to be.

 Maybe it’s at least partly inevitable.  When Star Trek began, nothing like it had been done on television before.  The series invented its story universe with every episode, and so every episode was exploring the unknown.  Perhaps it’s impossible to get back that innocence.

 For a lot has happened in 57 years.  Back when it began, Star Trek’s content was shaped more directly by generations of science fiction and not quite two decades of television drama.

  Science fiction that followed Jules Verne speculated on new technologies and what might be found on other planets, both imagined from the basis of known fact and science.  The science fiction that followed H.G. Wells used imagined technologies, phenomena and forms of life as metaphors to illuminate aspects of human life. (This is how Margaret Atwood divides it, and it’s a good starting point.)

 Following either progenitor, s/f writers also explored highly speculative science with cosmological and philosophical implications—everything from alternative archeology and anthropology (some of which has turned out to have some basis in fact) to implications of quantum physics and the additions and alterations over the years suggested by new astronomical and sub-atomic data.

Just as the Star Trek series adapted technologies and protocols seen in earlier sci-fi movies and television shows, the stories followed both Verne and Wells in speculating on a possible future while telling metaphorical tales, some of which applied to urgent contemporary social and political questions.

  While some of these stories came from science fiction writers, a great many were created by veteran television writers, sometimes re-purposing plots found everywhere, from ancient drama and classic fiction to TV westerns and Captain Video.  This was television drama, but westerns and other shows also often told morality tales, and so did Star Trek.

 Yet as the first full-hour network drama set in the far future, Star Trek was also open-ended: everything was possible in locations in time and space where no one had gone before. 

 But seeds of the current situation were also sown back then.  Gene Roddenberry believed that for a series with continuing characters set in the strange new worlds of the future, the show had to create and maintain a self-consistent story universe.

  So besides envisioning the basic template of as diverse a crew as he could get away with (or perhaps as diverse as anyone could imagine existing in a few centuries), as well as assembling talented collaborators and working carefully on how the series would look, GR did what Wells and other designers of alternative worlds knew to do: he made rules.  

Every week would bring a new story, but the technologies would have the same capabilities and work the same way week after week.  There was a chain of command aboard the Enterprise, and a set a standard procedures.  As much as possible for a starship warping through the galaxy, the Enterprise was grounded.

 As writers introduced new planets and new aliens, later writers had to honor the basics of those planets and characters if they used them in subsequent stories.  (There were periods of adjustment but once the template was found—for Klingons, say—it remained consistent.) Events in one story might inform later stories, until a kind of backstory was created for the main characters and Star Trek as a whole.

 Some of the “rules” were set forth in the Star Trek Writer’s Guide, which was revised as the series went on (I have before me the third revision: 31 typed and mimeographed pages dated April 17, 1967.)  It provides character background, technology and capabilities.  Believability in action is stressed, but also meaning, the metaphorical layer.

 The rules were needed because each episode had a different writer and director.  That’s also why actors playing the major roles became caretakers of their characters and what they did and how they did it.  Together they created the Star Trek universe.

 That universe expanded with new crews in a new century, beginning with The Next Generation. A rich storytelling universe supported hundreds of stories for five main crews and sets of characters, over nearly 40 years. 

In the meantime, the Star Trek universe generated other stories, principally in a series of novels.  Though officially permitted by whatever entity owned Star Trek at the time, these novels often went their own ways in terms of story and characters.  It was I believe in connection with the novels that the concept of “canon” was first introduced.  “Canon” was meant to denote all the aspects of the “real” Star Trek universe, at first defined as everything in the television and motion picture stories (but not the novels.)

 Canon is an interesting concept, and today it is a powerful one. While the dictionary defines it as a general law or principle, its second definition is a collection of sacred books regarded as genuine.  The Star Trek rules and guidelines (commonly called its Bible), along with that long history of story, had become canon law.

 Those of us raised as Catholics recognize canon law as the fundamentals of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Violations of canon were serious stuff, heavily sinful.  Canon was zealously guarded by Church hierarchy. Violating canon was heresy, punished by excommunication (an early version of being blocked,unfriended or ghosted—in other words, excluded and exiled.)  Canon today seems to have become a real factor in what stories are told.

 But the hierarchy in charge of Star Trek is not the only arbiter.  Star Trek’s relationship to the corporate entities that made the shows was always complicated. According to GR, he was constantly fighting against corporate control.  That control seems to have become more pronounced at the end of the Berman era.  Today Star Trek is seen as a valuable “franchise,” and the changes in corporate ownership in recent years has been dizzying.  The switch to streaming is still fluid, as evidenced by recent cancellations and the abrupt changes in access to the catalog. 

 But there is another factor strongly in play, with roots in the original series era.  With GR’s connivance, fans organized to write letters demanding that the original series be renewed after the first and second seasons.  After the original series left the air, fans organized Star Trek conventions.  There had been science fiction conventions where some attendees wore costumes, but there had been nothing the size and specific focus of those Star Trek conventions in the 1970s forward.  With the letter campaigns and especially the conventions, the phenomenon of fandom was born—not just for Star Trek, but for everyone.

 Fandom then acquired new tools for expression. Mostly through the bulletin boards on sites devoted to Star Trek, the Internet started to have influence, especially in the final years of Star Trek: Enterprise and the Star Trek: Nemesis feature film.  The negativity on the Internet, together with low ratings and box office failure, ended in the demise of the Rick Berman era in 2005, and the lineage from Gene Roddenberry through Berman was broken.

 By the time of the J.J. Abrams features, social media was prominent.  Abrams and then the creators of Star Trek: Discovery and other television shows paid closer attention to social media, made producers and stars more accessible, and saw conventions as potent promotional opportunities.

 Meanwhile, fandom (which may be defined as a subset of the more diverse universe of Star Trek fans) was becoming more aware of the business side of Star Trek.  Online discussions were at least as likely to be about production costs and box office as possible meanings in Star Trek stories.  Corporate, producers and fandom were growing more aware of each other, and engaging more directly.

 Today fandom is a real force in Star Trek and its storytelling.  In particular, fandom engages in questions of canon.  Variations are closely debated, and though some are accepted, others are condemned. Star Trek canon is not enforced only by a corporate Vatican but by a hyper-informed and vigilant fandom. This process is not all destructive, but it is consequential.  

All these past Star Trek stories, with their basic consistencies and through-lines, form a kind of mythology, and fandom is deeply engaged with that mythology, its familiar characters and events. Thanks to social media and the structures of the entertainment business today, Star Trek producers cannot afford to offend fandom too much.  They depend on fans who operate in social media, and vote by means of streaming subscriptions.  In this context, it’s all fan service.

 Gene Roddenberry respected fans and interacted with them at conventions.  But he was very direct and firm that fans would not dictate Star Trek content.  Today fandom may not write the stories, but it is one factor that may be limiting the storytelling. 

 These seem to me to be the chief factors leading to my impression that today’s Star Trek is less about exploring strange new worlds or ideas and their implications, and more about itself and its own mythology.

 The apparent emphasis on character interaction over situation and ideas may be another important factor. Taken together, the character emphasis and the self-referencing tendency may help to explain my impression that current Star Trek gives much lower priority than in its formative years to really engaging with urgent concerns of today’s world by means of exploring strange new worlds.  In sometimes awkward but sometimes revelatory ways, that’s what the original series and TNG did.  That to a great extent is what inspired Star Trek fans in the first place.

 Today’s Star Trek shows have revisited and expanded on issues that past Star Trek stories explored, for a new audience. They have dealt to some degree with certain implications of technology, though they seem oddly obsessed with cloning.  

But more powerful technology is no longer the chief source of urgent problems, if it ever was. Many of our concerns and our understanding of the world have changed in 57 years.  We are much more aware of the roles of ecological factors and non-human life, as we are faced with the challenges of climate distortion and the imminent possibility of mass extinctions.  We are more aware than ever of the dire consequences of a planet ruled by a few extremely wealthy individuals and corporations, with everyone else scrambling in uncertainty and insecurity. 

 Engaging in such questions as race, the arms race and the nuclear age, cultural differences and such larger questions as a more complex reading of human nature, Star Trek formed its character: the essence, the soul of Star Trek.  The commitment to retain that character by today’s Star Trek creators as well as viewers is heartening.  It was the motivation for many over the years to become devoted Star Trek fans (whether or not they became vocal members of fandom.)  But that commitment loses its power if it becomes the rote of canon.  It has to be actualized.

  Perhaps I’m wrong about the current shows. My perspective is derived from watching Star Trek for all of those 57 years.  That does not make me (in today’s terms) the target demographic, to say the least.  Perhaps newer viewers see the same kinds of explorations, and feel themselves changed by them as we once did.

 But consider this possibility: at its best, Star Trek once engaged with the strange new worlds that illuminate our world—the world that television drama largely refused to examine. These were the urgent public problems and mysteries that most vexed us as viewers. Now Star Trek seems to live in the no-longer-strange old world of its own mythos.  Mythologies can be defining and healthy, generating new stories and insights, but they can also become stultifying and irrelevant, until eventually they consume themselves.

Star Trek: Insurrection (Star Trek IX)

  This is the ninth of a series of essays on the first ten Star Trek features, the Trekalog.

by William Severini Kowinski

Star Trek: Insurrection has become a problematic movie as the ninth in the original ten (or Trekalog) of Star Trek features. Even its title has become troublesome. (There’s no insurrection to overthrow the government in this story.  We now know better what that looks like.) Though I have great affection for this film, I’ve been bothered by its shortcomings, from the first time I saw it in a theatre the week it was released in December 1998. I felt then it could have been a great Star Trek movie, as well as a brave one. In many respects, it dazzled me. I still believe thematically it remains a major evocation of the soul of Star Trek.   

This film, written by Michael Piller from a story by Piller and Rick Berman, and directed by Jonathan Frakes, has its fans.  At the time it opened, critic Gene Siskel said it was the only Star Trek movie he truly enjoyed.  (His TV partner, Roger Ebert, had a different view.) 

 Others have come to value it over the years, or at least elements of it. Jerry Goldsmith’s score—especially the lovely Ba’ku theme—remains one of my favorites, and the acting, the characterizations, the humor gave it an attractive buoyancy.  After many subsequent viewings, I’ve found more that’s annoying but I also retain that initial affection, and admire it even more for its courage.

 The conventional wisdom has become that it is more of a television episode than a movie.  Insofar as I even know what that means, I take the opposite view: I think it tries too hard to be an action movie.  Or more generally, it may simply be that the Star Trek features series started to run out of luck. Many if not most very good feature films have a pretty long history. They may have been conceived five or eight or ten years before they get made.  Even some sequels take years to develop.  But Star Trek movies rolled out at a faster pace—every two or three years.  They typically emerged from assembling bits and pieces of screenplay drafts, often at the last minute, with lots of different imput.  This fortuitously resulted in some excellent films.   Unfortunately that kind of luck doesn’t always appear.

 But before wallowing in the details, the most important element of this movie is the core story, the principles that are at stake.  In special features interviews for the first expanded DVD of this movie, writer Michael Piller said that he wanted to move away from the darker Star Trek (not only the previous feature, Star Trek: First Contact, but the ongoing television stories, particular of Deep Space Nine) and the darker path science fiction had been taking in general in the 1990s, to revive the optimistic spirit and idealistic modeling of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision.  “I wanted to do one for Gene,” he said.  So Insurrection pivoted on a moral issue with a real world history, as well as portraying a society that emphasized a different aspect of the soul of Star Trek.

 
The title sequence—set to that lilting but slightly unconventional Goldsmith theme—depicts a happy, healthy and busy agrarian society with some pre-industrial mechanisms.  But we quickly see hidden observers, Starfleet uniforms and unknown aliens (the Son’a), just before violence disrupts this peaceful day. The android Data has seemingly gone berserk, and has deliberately unmasked the hidden observers.  He also appears to be wounded.

 Meanwhile the Enterprise-E is far away, on yet another minor diplomatic mission (“Does anyone remember when we were explorers?” Captain Picard asks.) After being contacted by an Admiral Dougherty requesting Data’s schematics, and then a brief conversation with the Admiral about Data apparently gone amok, Picard (against the Admiral’s wishes) diverts the Enterprise to the distant planet involved, in an untraveled pocket of the galaxy called the Briar Patch because its environment disrupts starship technologies.

 Maneuvering a shuttle and a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan, Picard and Worf disable Data, and Geordi La Forge learns what went wrong: Data had been attacked and engaged his ethical subprograms.  But why was he attacking the Son’a and Federation personnel—everyone but the Ba’ku on the planet?

 Picard and an Enterprise team beam down to free the unmasked observers Dougherty tells him are hostages. They find instead peaceful, calm and intelligent villagers, treating the “off-worlders” as guests.  Picard soon learns that the Ba’ku are warp-capable but have chosen a life without advanced technology, on this welcoming planet. 

 Picard and the Ba’ku investigate what Data found that got him shot: a holo-ship, programmed to simulate the Ba’ku village.  When several Son’a attack them, Picard realizes what is happening: a conspiracy to transport the Ba’ku onto the holo-ship and abduct them. “You go to sleep one night in the village. Wake up the next morning on this flying holodeck transported en masse.  In a few days, you’re relocated on a similar planet without even realizing it.” But the question remains: why?

 By now some of the Enterprise crew are feeling and acting oddly. Riker and Troi are re-igniting their old romance, Worf is showing signs of going through Klingon puberty, and Picard himself feels a burst of vitality and exuberance.  Having danced his way to a mirror to examine his jawline, he realizes what is happening, and returns to the planet to speak with Anij and the other Ba’ku, who confirm that the “metaphasic radiation,” a quality of the rings around the planet that continuously regenerates genetic structure, is keeping them young and even improves their health.  Just being in orbit around the planet is enough to affect the Enterprise crew. Three centuries earlier, the Ba’ku left a war-torn planet and searched for an isolated haven to establish a peaceful culture, ending up here.

 Picard now realizes that the planned Ba’ku abduction has something to do with the “fountain of youth” effects of the planet’s rings.  He vows to prevent it, and in explaining his reason to Anij, Picard states in plain language the moral core of this story: “Some of the darkest chapters in the history of my world involve the forced relocation of a small group of people to satisfy the demands of a large one.  I’d hoped we had learned from our mistakes, but…it seems that some of us haven’t.”

 Those forced relocations and related behaviors (up to and including genocide) have happened multiple times on every inhabited continent on Earth, from ancient days through our own time in the 21^st century.  Many would observe that they are still happening. 

 But the instance Michael Piller said was foremost in his mind when he wrote this script was the removal over several centuries of a series of American Indian peoples, most graphically represented by the Trail of Tears that resulted from what was literally called the Indian Removal Act in 1830.  Cherokee, Seminole and other tribal groups were driven from their communities in the southeast (near where gold was discovered) and forced—including force-marched—thousands of miles to reservations in the West.  Thousands died of starvation and disease along the way, while others perished shortly after their arrival.

 Later, in his confrontation with Admiral Dougherty, Picard asserted that removal “will destroy the Ba’ku, just as cultures have been destroyed in every other forced relocation throughout history.”  Relocation and related oppressions certainly destroyed American Indian cultures that had flourished for many centuries. 

In this confrontation, Dougherty makes the case for kidnapping the Ba’ku.  The Son’a have developed a way to extract the youth-preserving qualities of the planet’s rings but the process would render the planet “uninhabitable for many generations.” They will deploy the huge, eye-catching particles collector, with technology the Federation can't duplicate.   But the planet (oddly, it is never named) is in Federation space, so for this mission the Son’a and the Federation are partners, sanctioned by the Federation Council.

 After Dougherty parries his proposals to delay the procedure for further study of alternatives while the Son’a and Ba’ku share the planet, Picard lays it on the line: “We are betraying the principles upon which the Federation was founded.  It’s an attack upon its very soul.”

 Though there are technical interpretations of how the Prime Directive does or doesn’t apply, Picard is consistent in his assertion about history.  For him, the nuances of “non-interference” are based upon a hard-won founding principle, which in a TNG episode he spelled out to his crew: “We are not invaders.  We are explorers.” 

The distinction is basic, and a huge change. Historically, explorers were the scouts for invaders. Again, we have to look no further than the Americas. Explorers, financed by governments and commercial interests, returned with news of lands to inhabit and resources to plunder and bring back to Europe. Columbus thought the friendly natives might make good slaves.

  When the Federation was founded, it committed to not repeating this history, to respecting the cultures and the lifeforms on planets it explored.  A number of Next Generation stories were about this very subject.

 This is what Starfleet’s Prime Directive is really about.  It is what makes the Federation different, not only in the fictional universe it inhabits, but in our universe as a vision of justice, diversity, and respect for all life.  It is as Picard said, an element of the Federation’s soul, and a major expression of the soul of Star Trek that has inspired so many for generations.

 Dougherty counters: “Jean-Luc, we are only moving six hundred people.” 

 “How many people does it take, Admiral, before it becomes wrong?” Picard replies.  “A thousand? Fifty thousand? A million?  How many people does it take, Admiral?”

 With its swelling music tag, this speech is a popular moment with many Trek fans.  Personally I feel this choice of tone makes Picard sound too pompous and self-righteous—he’s not really asking the question, he’s being indignant.  It’s no wonder that Dougherty dismisses his objections and orders him to another part of the galaxy.  But his point is solid—and controversial.

 Many people, evidently including some members of the cast, see sense and maybe a more persuasive case based on the numbers: Dougherty said that the regenerative properties of the rings’ radiation could benefit billions. Doesn’t helping billions justify moving six hundred people (and probably sacrificing their current perpetual youthfulness, perhaps condemning them to imminent death)?  Don’t the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? 

By positing billions against 600, this script forces a hard look at the core principles.  Doubtless the European invaders thought timber from American forests for sailing ships and other purposes, as well as crops like tobacco, would benefit millions in Europe, and therefore justified getting rid of the cultures of  hundreds or thousands living in those forests and on those lands that were in the way.  Just as they justified the Trail of Tears because gold would help their country’s economy, and therefore more people. 

 Invasion and exploitation always justifies itself on supposed principles, as long as they don’t get in the way of the invader’s gain.  What may look like a sensible calculus is usually a convenient rationalization for greed, based on greater military power and (almost always) assumptions of racial and cultural superiority.  Even the implication that the Federation can do what it wants with this planet because it is in "Federation space," (and apparently the  Ba'ku who live there don't have to be consulted) is a species of imperialism. 

 Picard had allowed himself to be swayed by this calculus before, in the seventh season episode “Journey’s End,” as described in an earlier post.  In that story it was young Wesley Crusher who rebelled against the forced relocation of a group of American Indians.  Perhaps it was this incident, augmented by the youthful idealism and rebelliousness revived by the rings, that reminded Picard so forcefully of the costs of violating this principle—as well as the price of upholding it.   

The rest of the story involves Picard and his core crew—the Magnificent Seven—and their championing of the Ba’ku.  There is a final twist—the discovery that the Son’a and Ba’ku are the same race, the grotesquely aging children against their perpetually youthful parents.  The Son’a’s motives are revealed to include revenge.

 There are also a few scenes involving the Ba’ku culture, particularly two conversations between Picard and Anij, as they grow closer.  In essence, Anij talks about fully inhabiting the present moment, without reviewing the past or planning for the future.  “You explore the universe,” Anij says to Picard.  “We have discovered that a single moment in time can be a universe in itself, full of powerful forces.  Most people aren’t aware enough of the now to even notice.”

  Here on Earth, mindfully exploring the present moment is a both meditation technique and its intention, developed in Zen and other Buddhist practice, only recently adapted in American and European contexts. A different approach to valuing the present moment was a theme in Star Trek: Generations, where it was a consequence of mortality, rather than a lesson of immortality. 

Later Anij demonstrates the ability to slow time down, or at least the perception of time. (Making the water drops visible as they fall, or the hummingbird’s visible wings may remind some viewers of effects of a certain herb, and of spending seeming hours watching smoke curl under a lamp.)  The Ba’ku insights may suggest the value that can be derived from different “alien” cultures, even small and isolated ones, like Tibet (though forms of Buddhism are prominent in many Asian countries.)  Perhaps what the Ba’ku have to teach would be more valuable than what the rings of their planet can offer.

 Though our own (often small) Native cultures were crushed before many of their profound insights were known or understood, some of those cultures made deep impressions on the dominant culture, and that continues to happen. For instance, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederation of tribes existed democratically, probably for longer than the United States has so far. Contacts with Founding Fathers and others, some scholars say, meaningfully influenced the idea and structure of the United States.  In turn, it influences the United Federation of Planets, though the Haudenosaunee had a different Prime Directive than Starfleet: In every decision, consider the impact on the seventh generation to come. (For us, seven generations takes us into the 23^rd century.) 

 J.M. Dillard’s novelization, published to coincide with the movie’s initial release, was based on a slightly earlier version of the script, but differs in plot details mostly in a different ending, in which Ru’afo escapes the collector but plunges into the rings, speedily becoming younger and younger until he disappears.  Apparently this was changed during shooting when that ending didn’t seem to be working.  The actual ending is disappointing: Picard and the villain climbing and fighting against a ticking clock to get to a control panel replicates the Generations climax and there are similar scenes in First Contact, while the blue background (meant to be the rings outside?) screams unfinished visual effect.

 The Son’a’s appearance is different in the novelization—not the wrinkled wraiths we see on the screen but with surgically thin baby smooth skin, and ostentatiously adorned in robes and jewels. Perhaps this was too close to a Hollywood reality.  Apart from their skin stretching salon, just about the only remnant of the Son’a’s conspicuous love of luxury is the incongruous sofa that is Ru’afo’s command chair on the bridge of his ship. (In the film, the Son’a have two alien slave races: the Ellora, who look like Vegas showgirls in body paint, and the Tarlac, who resemble the aliens in Buckaroo Banzai.)

 Apart from some Harlequin romance level descriptions, Dillard does elaborate on motives and intentions.  The duck-blind observation of the Ba’ku, in her interpretation, was itself always a ruse, to mask the secret of what the Son’a and Admiral Dougherty were up to. It takes an extra step to realize this from the actual movie, for the only hint I got was the implication of Dougherty saying the Ba’ku originally came from elsewhere in space (and hence weren’t covered by the Prime Directive), suggesting he must have known they weren’t a pre-warp society that required secrecy to study. 

 Towards the end, when Admiral Dougherty learns the true relationship of the Son’a and Ba’ku, Dillard has him realizing that Ru’afo was primarily seeking revenge, and that he never intended to share the youth-giving technology or its fruits with the Federation.  Similarly, Picard has a flash of recognition as he confronts Ru’afo on the collector: just as he had been driven by vengeance against the Borg in the events depicted in Star Trek: First Contact, so Ru’afo was obsessed with revenge against the Ba’ku who had rejected and exiled him. Even though revenge seems the default motivation for Star Trek movie villains, this movie might have benefited from such clarifying moments.

 Dillard also elaborates earlier on Picard’s thoughts from his initial confrontation with Dougherty.  He reasons that the Federation would probably need no more than a few years to figure out a better way to benefit from the cellular regeneration effects of the rings, and that the Son’a were rushing things for reasons of their own.  He doubts that the full and true plan had ever been presented to the Federation Council.  Clearer indications of Dougherty’s and Picard’s suspicions and realizations in the movie (perhaps as Dillard developed them) might have added texture and interest to the movie’s story, making it more of the unraveling of a mystery.

 I don’t want to belabor what I experienced as flaws in the film.  Every film has flaws, but some are serious enough—or there is an accumulation of them—to weaken the credibility and flow of the movie, or to engender confusion and raise questions, all of which are harmful when they take the viewer out of the story.  My disappointments are no doubt heightened by my conclusion that this could have been the best of the TNG features.

My first impression that this was a movie that just missed being really good was based on what seemed to be a confusing rhythm, a sense that, despite some slow scenes and comic moments, it just rushed on, with no rhythm but momentum.  I felt it needed more pace; it needs to breathe.  It’s not as if running time was a problem—this was the shortest of all Star Trek features.   

I felt this most acutely on first view in the cut from Geordi’s viewing of a sunrise—the first time in his life he’d seen one with normal vision, due to the planet’s regeneration effect.  In his original commentary to First Contact, director Jonathan Frakes noted the temptation to cut off a scene too quickly just to keep the movie moving.  The quick cut from the sunrise and Geordi’s eyes to an overview of orbiting ships was jarring, and to me trivialized what could have been a more powerful moment.  

 I was also taken out of the flow by elements of the story that didn't seem credible, like the simpleminded plan to relocate the Ba’ku (they weren’t going to notice they were no longer on their planet, with its particular hills and familiar sky?) or Data and the others in their invisibility suits tromping around supposedly undetected, as if the Ba’ku had no other sense but sight.

 I was always uneasy with the portrayal of the Ba’ku, though the actors rescued it for me.  Subsequent viewings suggest why they seem less credible than symbolic: their gracefully styled but rigidly earth-tone clothing, their uniformly pristine village buildings-- more elegant versions of a Phoenix suburb (as Marina Sirtis suggests in a recent commentary) and (as Jonathan Frakes notes) their unbroken whiteness. 

Then there are the missed opportunities, including a clearer sense (perhaps from a single point of view, like Picard’s) of the contrast between the trivial hurry of the Enterprise greeting a new Federation member, and the slower, fuller life on the planet, absent phaser fire. Another is the assertion that deploying the collector would destroy life on the planet for generations, implying for more than its people.  So even if the Ba’ku were removed, all other planetary life would be destroyed (though we see little of it), an act of geocide that would have been a major concern in a TNG episode. (And if Ru’aflo didn’t misspeak when he said “everything in this sector will be dead or dying," on more than one planet.)

 I get the impression now that not everybody making this movie was on the same page, contributing to  a lack of clarity and pace that can prevent viewers from just riding along on a voyage, with its ups and downs, sidetracks and problems solved together.  Confusion and disagreement about the core issues probably also contributed.  (Even in the third season of Picard, Captain Shaw’s erroneous if funny description of this movie’s events, particularly that it was Picard who violated the Prime Directive, suggests this confusion, as well as how the story might be whispered about at the time so that the Federation saves face.) 

Yet a lot of the pieces are there: the exodus from the village, the Enterprise space battle, the transporter and holoship trickery on the Son'a, the hummingbirds.  Some fans reacted against the humor, and the change in characterizations.  I enjoyed all of that. (Sure, Data in the haystack was sappy and forced, but so goofy that isolated it remains an awkward highlight.) The Enterprise crew didn’t need an alien virus to get a little silly, as in The Naked Now/Time—just an infusion of youth.  It’s fun watching these actors do humor, and do it well. In this (as well as other respects) it reminded me of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when the Kirk Enterprise crew loosened up.  It also turns out to be a kind of preview to aspects of the TNG characters as they appear in Picard season 3. 

 If the viewer gets swept past the incongruities, then the buoyancy and the scenery in this movie combine for a bright ride. There are plenty of incidents, a fine romance for Captain Picard and Anij (though their kiss got cut entirely) and along with the main cast there are solid performances by F. Murray Abraham (Ru’afo), Anthony Zerbe (Admiral Dougherty) and Donna Murphy (Anij) as well as Gregg Henry (Son’a Gallatin),Daniel Hugh Kelly (Ba’ku Sojef) and a very young Michael Welch (Ba’ku child Artim.)  

 Director Frakes had approached First Contact’s Enterprise scenes as a horror story, using some traditional horror movie moves.  Those scenes were dark—often literally. Everyone—from Paramount to Rick Berman to Patrick Stewart, credited for the first time as a producer, wanted something lighter for this film.  So this time Frakes directed an action adventure out in the bright daylight, like a western. That final shot of the seven Enterprise officers all lined up, capped the reference to The Magnificent Seven heroes defending a helpless village. 

 The CGI is now a little outdated (this was the first Trek film to use it exclusively) but the Briar Patch is visually stunning, and the action scenes are fun.  Despite its reputation, this movie didn’t do so badly at the box office, either.  It’s too bad that it couldn’t more seamlessly bring together its moral center, the story and the mood, as did its model predecessor, The Voyage Home.