Axiom’s Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

(Continuing our Summer of Star Trek series)

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars (Give Your Rating)

After the great success of Star Trek: First Contact, producer Rick Berman and Paramount decided that, with the writing team of Moore and Braga busy with other projects, long-time TNG writer/producer Michael Piller would be the idea man for the next motion picture in the Trek franchise. Piller had previously turned down the opportunity to work on ST: Generations, and admitted to thinking First Contact was a little darker than he liked his Trek. He thought that Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Trek was to make people feel good about the future, that there was hope for us as a species in the future, and that the previous film had embraced a more nihilistic vision that may have been more in tune with Americans’ taste in sf of late but didn’t fit The Great Bird’s template for the series. Piller favored a “search for the Fountain of Youth” storyline, while Berman’s idea was to remake Joseph Conrad’s classic story “Heart of Darkness” (which was the basis for Coppola’s great film Apocalypse Now), kind of a TOS “The Omega Glory” meets TNG’s “The Wounded”. And there were, of course, problems with the script. In the first draft, Picard was to hunt down an old classmate who was gunning for Romulans while the crew of the Enterprise grew younger and younger due to the effects of the space they had to travel through, in the next version the ship was tracking down a rogue Data, with Picard eventually having to “kill” the android, only to find a way to reactivate him later in the film.

But Patrick Stewart objected. Sort of. I’ve always read that he objected, but from what he himself said that he told Berman and Piller I’ve never really been able to see much conflict with what they had down. According to Stewart, he said he thought the captain should be in the middle of the action, that the crew should have some fun in a lighter film than the last, and that Picard should have a romantic relationship. Two of those three things were already on tap in the scripts proposed. Piller then came up with Picard and crew having to rebel against a faction of Starfleet officers working with an alien race to steal the homeworld of a race of “children”. But it was decided that Picard’s motivations for going against orders in this script were rather flimsy (I guess it is ridiculous to think that a Starship Captain would oppose a shadow cadre of Starfleet personnel just because they were going to not only violate the Prime Directive but also steal a planet from a bunch of children; what was Piller thinking?) so the Baku, the “children”, were changed to adults and Picard was shown to be romantically involved with one of them.

The story: A peaceful scene on an idyllic alien world is suddenly shattered by phaser fire. This attack is shown to be the work of Data, who then turns the phaser on the cloaked Federation outpost filled with anthropologists and exobiologists sent to study the Ba’ku, the alien race of this world. Admiral Dougherty then calls the Enterprise and asks for Data’s schematics and any other info Picard can give him but tells Picard that a visit from the Enterprise is unwarranted. So… well you know Picard has to go there. As the Enterprise passes through the “Briar Patch” several effects are noticed through the crew—Geordi’s ocular implants begin to bother him, Riker and Troi’s earlier feelings for each other begin to resurface, Worf experiences acne. Data is captured and found to have been attacked by a race called the Son’a, whom the Federation has allied with even though they make Ketracel White, the drug the Founders use to keep the Jem’Hadar in line, and the Federation is currently embroiled in the Dominion War. Picard is also informed by the leader of the Ba’ku, Anij, that they knew something was wrong with Data’s positronic brain but weren’t sure how to fix it, which tells our heroes that this race is advanced but has turned their back willfully on technology. They also find that a cloaked Federation ship is hidden on the surface for the purpose of surreptitiously sneaking the Ba’ku off their homeworld. Turns out that due to metaphasic radiation ringing the planet it is a veritable fountain of youth and some in the Federation have decided that the way of life for the 600 people living there is expendable in order to reap the benefits of this fountain. Picard and crew refuse to allow this transparent violation of the Prime Directive, and that’s before the Big Reveal later on.

Two things about this film. First, it is my favorite of the TNG-centric motion pictures despite the fact that it is, after all, little more than a two-part episode of the series. I thought the same thing about Generations. I think it has to do with the look of the films more than their content. Both Generations and Insurrection just look like episodes, with the CGI and the quality of the picture itself they just appear to be episodes of the tv show. With Generations that was kind of annoying (although not even in my Top Five of problems with that film), with this one it just didn’t bother me. I guess I’m just more interested in the story and how the characters interact with each other than how cool the sfx looks, especially when it comes to Trek.

The other thing I can say is how frightening it is to read some of the comments people make about this film. I am frequently aghast at the callous disregard some people have for the rights of others, and those same people’s willingness to violate any rules or laws if they can justify it as being for what they perceive as the “greater good”. I’ve read in places where people have actually suggested that Dougherty should have just exterminated the Ba’ku when Picard wrecked his plan to take them away without their knowledge, or at least beam them to a ship and lock them away in the brig. I can say I didn’t really get why Federation medical personnel couldn’t just experiment with metaphasic radiation on their own with the Ba’ku still living on the planet (I know Dougherty explained it but I just can’t believe the Feddies couldn’t synthesize it), but that doesn’t mean it’s all right just to destroy a people’s way of life and steal their property. And that’s even without my mentioning that we really don’t know if they can replicate the radiation’s effects. I mean, how long do you think they’ve studied the “Earth” they found in the TOS ep “Miri” or the “Earth” they found in the TOS ep “The Omega Glory” without finding a way to make those longevity systems work anywhere else? (I know what McCoy said in TOS but surely medical science has advanced in the 80-odd years since, not to mention the fact that he was speaking after a mere few hours of research.)

Give your rating of Star Trek: First Contact and the movies that preceded it

Previous – Star Trek: First Contact

Next – Star Trek: Nemesis

(Continuing our Summer of Star Trek series)

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Stars (Give Your Rating)

Immediately after the release of Star Trek: Generations it was decided that another film, this one centering exclusively on the cast of the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series, should be made to coincide with the 30th Anniversary of the franchise as a whole. It was also decided that the creative team behind Generations, producer Rick Berman and writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, would be placed in charge of the new film. Berman wanted a time travel story, Moore and Braga favored a new encounter with the Borg, a collective of cyborgs whose “race” is expanded through assimilation of unwary individuals of any species. It was eventually decided that both ideas would be combined. Berman’s thought was that the Borg would travel to the past to short-circuit the European Renaissance and would be replete with sword fights and tights (which Patrick Stewart refused to wear) but it was decided that might fall too easily into camp. Braga and Moore had the idea that the Borg would try and interfere with the first warp flight by Zephram Cochrane, thereby preventing humanity’s first contact with the Vulcans, and that was pretty much the idea that would eventually see film (there were many details that would change from the original idea to the finished product). A few well-known directors such as Ridley Scott, among others, were considered to direct but between their saying no and the feeling that some of them just didn’t know Star Trek it was finally settled that Jonathan Frakes would direct. So the stage was set.

The story: Captain Jean-Luc Picard awakes on the Enterprise-E from a nightmare involving his assimilation by the Borg. He is then told by an admiral that a Borg ship has been spotted heading to Earth, and the Enterprise is ordered to patrol the Neutral Zone rather than help defend Earth due to Picard’s perceived emotional distress with the Borg. The Enterprise, of course, hears that the battle is going badly and disobeys orders, saving the crew of the Defiant, which includes old crewmate Worf, on their way to Sector 001 (Earth). They arrive and Picard directs the remnants of the fleet to fire upon a seemingly insignificant section of the Borg Cube, which then explodes, a spherical ship escaping the conflagration at the last moment. The sphere opens a temporal rift and disappears into it, leaving behind an Earth populated entirely by Borg (the Enterprise is theorized to have survived the changes due to their proximity to the rift). The Enterprise follows the sphere into the rift and the crew find themselves in 2063, one day before the first recorded warp flight by humans. They destroy the sphere only to find that the Borg have gotten a toehold on the Enterprise itself. Shenanigans ensue.

This film was the first major use of the Borg since Picard’s assimilation in the fourth season ep, “The Best of Both Worlds”. The decision not to use them was borne of budget constraints on the show and the feeling that they might lose their fearsomeness due to overexposure (a thought that was apparently overcome by the fourth season of Star Trek: Voyager). It was also decided to make the conflict with the Borg a little more personal by giving them a “hive queen” who would be known only as the Borg Queen and be given a personality and a sense of individual identity. I still think this was a real mistake, despite the fact that the Queen is such a good villain. If they had had her there to usurp the role of leader for the Borg, in the same manner as Lore from the fifth season TNG ep “Descent”, that would have been better. The whole point of the Borg is that they were supposed to be a perfect, complete collective consciousness wherein every individual was nothing more than a cell in a much larger “single entity”. And that entity’s sole purpose was to find and assimilate technologies it did not already possess. Having a “queen” gives that entity a personification that it did not need, in my opinion, although I do understand it from a narrative standpoint, I guess; it certainly made the story more appealing to the masses.

Besides that, my only real problem with the film is why the Borg came to Earth in the first place. I’ve never understood the Borg’s fascination with humanity. They’ve assimilated people from the Federation before, Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, humans, and they didn’t feel the need to rush to Romulus or Qo’noS or Vulcan, or any of a thousand other worlds between Earth and Borg space. But even that’s not really the problem I have: I don’t understand why the Borg came all the way to Earth in the first place before going into the past. They could have gone back three hundred years in the Delta Quadrant and then come to Earth in the 21st Century completely unopposed. (And that’s without my considering that they could keep going back into the past and updating the Borg of previous time periods so that the Borg of previous centuries would be completely unstoppable and would have expanded naturally all the way to the Alpha Quadrant. This, given the way they “evolve” and “discover” new technologies, would create a completely new and strange kind of “societal” Mobius strip, in which they would have to assimilate technologies they already have in order to have had it in the first place.)

I do have other problems with the film, but it was made to, one, show that the Next Gen cast of characters could carry a feature film on its own, and, two, to make a profit for the studio. It performed both of these functions very well. It was filmed on a budget of $46 million and made a total of $146 million worldwide. It was also very well received by the critics.

Give your rating of Star Trek: First Contact and the movies that preceded it

Previous – Star Trek: Generations

Next – Star Trek: Insurrection

(Continuing our Summer of Star Trek series)

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars (Give Your Rating)

The seventh film of the Trek franchise, and the first without even a glance-over by series creator Gene Roddenberry, who had died in ’91 right before the release of the last film to star the cast of TOS, was released in ’94 and starred the cast of the extremely popular Star Trek: The Next Generation TV show. TNG had stopped production after seven seasons to move into the more profitable film franchise in 1993 and this “maiden voyage” was fairly successful monetarily, with mixed critical results. It is an important film for the ST canon in that it gives us our final view of James Doohan as Scotty, plus the two captains of the Enterprise, Kirk and Picard, meet, and Kirk dies. Some would also say it’s important for paving the way for the Enterprise-E but I say that crashing the boat’s been done, and with a lot more style, in The Search for Spock—that, and we’ve seen the Enterprise-D blow up, like, a hundred times on TNG over the years (remember the ep “Cause and Effect” where the entire story centered on the D exploding over and over again?). It could have indeed been a true turning point for the character of Picard on finding out his brother and nephew—especially the young Rene—have died, but, as we’ll see in the remainder of this series of reviews, it seems a transient point that only matters in this film.

The story: Retired officers Kirk, Scott, and Chekov are on hand for the christening of the Enterprise-B, which had apparently planned to install everything Tuesday for the emergency today. The Enterprise has to save a couple of ships full of refugees, among them TNG’s Guinan and a scientist named Soran, from an anomaly that Soran appears eager to get back to. Meanwhile, Kirk has gone down to check on <insert technobabble here> and is evidently swept out into space when the compartment is ripped open. The scene then shifts to the holodeck of the Enterprise-D, where the Klingon Worf is being promoted. Three things of interest here: Picard gets some very bad news from Earth, Riker does something that nearly makes me like him (it was funny), and Data does something that earns him the ire of Dr. Crusher (that despite what Geordie says was also funny). Then we meet Soran again and the whole picture goes down the tubes, in large measure.

The main problem I had with this picture is that the whole Nexus thing, the plot device on which hangs the entire story of Kirk and Picard’s team-up, just doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s ostensibly a paradise that flies at random through the galaxy, a place which Soran and Guinan have been to before and for which Soran has decided to give everything everyone else owns to get back to ( yes, I do believe he was a politician in the 20th Century; El-Aurians are extremely long-lived and he obviously has the moral makeup for the job). Guinan tells Picard that she has tried for the past 80 years to forget her brief sojourn there, and that if Picard were ever to be taken there he would no longer care about her, his friends, his ship; nothing outside of the Nexus, which is the center of all love and joy in the Universe, a place of eternal happiness, will matter to him. Picard is, of course, taken into the Nexus and we see him just shake it off after, like, five minutes. He then goes to talk to Kirk, who, Guinan’s reflection still trapped in the Nexus (which is why I say that Kirk isn’t really dead, since anyone in the Nexus appears to always reside there) tells him, has just gotten there (from Kirk’s point-of-view). Of course, Kirk decides that he wants to leave after, like, five minutes. The two captains then go and… well, I’m sure that even if you haven’t seen it you already can guess what happens.

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This is a fun film to watch, and it is Trek. Those two things count for a lot, and can wash out some of the problems with the story in the film. The sections which dealt with Data’s emotion chip and Geordie’s visor being used as a spying device by Lursa and B’Etor (“He must be the only engineer in Starfleet who never goes to Engineering!”) are fun and necessary for both character development—in Data’s case—and story development—in Geordie’s. Unfortunately, even Kirk’s death is robbed of much of the impact it might have had by the lackluster battle with the mediocre villain Soran. The pattern of the story just can’t support some of the very good threads of storytelling that could have made up a beautiful fabric of a fine film.

One last thing. Leonard Nimoy declined to be in this film, which is a good thing since it got us one last chance to see James Doohan, and DeForest Kelley was too ill to be included, which is a bad thing (no offense to Walter Koenig) because we didn’t get one last farewell for Leonard McCoy. Not knowing the behind-the-scenes story when I saw this film, I always thought it odd to see Kirk and anyone other than Spock and McCoy on the bridge of the Enterprise-B.

Give your rating of Star Trek: Generations and the movies that preceded it

Previous – Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Next – Star Trek: First Contact

(Continuing our Summer of Star Trek series)

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 Stars (Give Your Rating)

After the critical and financial flop of The Final Frontier, the ST franchise looked to be dead. But with the 25th anniversary of the original show looming—and with the continued success of The Next Generation on television—it was decided that the original crew should get another shot. Producer Harve Bennett brought back the idea from what was to be the fourth film, thinking that a prequel set at Starfleet Academy could possibly rejuvenate the film franchise by rejuvenating the characters. (Interestingly, in Bennett’s storyline, Kirk’s father was to have disappeared in an accident during an experiment by Montgomery Scott, which means George Kirk was the original “Admiral Archer’s beagle”, if you remember from the new film.) This idea was, of course, roundly denounced by the original cast and the fan base, which followed the lead of the actors. After his idea was rejected, Bennett left the franchise. Then Walter Koenig submitted an idea in which the entire crew save for McCoy and Spock die by the end (for more on this read Koenig’s excellent autobiography Warped factors: A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universe), which was also rejected by the studio. Finally, Leonard Nimoy came up with an idea that embraced the news of the time, asking, “What if The Wall came down between the Klingons and the Federation?” He and Nick Meyer—who was tabbed to direct so as not to ruffle Shatner’s feathers—then hammered out the story with some help and Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn worked out a script, which ST patriarch Gene Roddenberry hated (more on that later).

The story: The Klingon moon Praxis, which is essential to the survival of the Klingon Empire, explodes, leaving the homeworld Qo’noS within 50 years or so of becoming completely uninhabitable. Captain Spock, ever the diplomat, volunteers the Enterprise-A and its soon to be retired crew to escort the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon’s flagship to Earth for negotiations with the Federation. Kirk is none too thrilled with this and would rather just let the Klingons die, and says so. Meanwhile, Spock’s protégé,a young Vulcan woman named Valeris, joins the crew and proceeds with Saavik-like grace (more on that later, too). The crew meets the Klingon delegation and appears to open fire on them. Chancellor Gorkon is assassinated and Kirk and McCoy, who had beamed aboard the Klingon ship to help, are arrested and tried and sentenced to life imprisonment on Rura Penthe. They escape with the aid of a shape-shifting alien, and a conspiracy is uncovered, a conspiracy between the old guard of both the Federation and Klingon Empire to make sure that the “good ol’ days” would continue.

As usual, I just give you the bare bones of the story. If you’ve seen it you know what happened and if you haven’t you should experience it for yourself. But there is one thing I have to talk about here that is a bit of a spoiler, because to me there’s one thing that keeps this from being in ST II-III-IV class. Some in the crew weren’t happy with the way their character’s were portrayed, and I have read other Trekkies complain about how bigoted Kirk and some of the Starfleet personnel seem (“You know only top-of-the-line models can even talk, right?”). Nichelle Nicholls was supposed to deliver the line “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” when the Klingons are invited to dine with the crew of the Enterprise but she apparently refused to say it; Koenig said it instead (and I always thought it would have made more sense if Nicholls said it). There were other lines and situations that some of the cast found difficult to handle due to their perceptions of bigotry. And I guess I can see the argument if it is that bigotry shouldn’t exist in the Federation—except that we’ve seen it before in TOS (Mr. Styles in “Balance of Terror” immediately springs to mind, Mr. Chekov in “The Trouble with Tribbles”, too). Beyond that, I’ve always thought actors are hired to act and that’s what they should do.

But that isn’t the thing that bugs me the most about this film. What bothers me most is Valeris. I’ve read that Gene Roddenberry hated the entire story, most likely because he had always tried to give us an idealized future for Man and the bigotry portrayed here didn’t sit well with him. That’s all well and good, but another thing he hated, and it appears he was given his way here, was that he didn’t think that Saavik should be portrayed as being involved in the conspiracy. The Great Bird of the Galaxy apparently thought she was too beloved a character to turn traitor. Problem is, from a storytelling standpoint, Saavik is precisely who should been the “inside man” on the Enterprise: She was in love with Kirk’s son David (in the novelization of The Search for Spock) and watched Klingons murder him for protecting her; she’s half-Romulan, and Romulans have a history of hostility with the Klingons; the audience knew and trusted her implicitly, and knew Spock should as well. She was the perfect traitor—she could have even been rehabilitated afterward; she didn’t have to know the whole plan, just the part about not helping the Klingons. I just don’t understand what GR was thinking here (wish I could still ask him).

Give your rating of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and the movies that preceded it

Previous – Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Next – Star Trek: Generations

Star Trek U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 Figurine Collection: Star Trek Fan Gift

(Continuing our Summer of Star Trek series)

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars (Give Your Rating)

I know, I know… I know there are people who will see that 3 star rating and start yelling at their computer; I know they’d rather yell at me but I’m not around. I know they’ll complain about the substandard effects, the absurdity of Spock having a brother, the absurdity of a culture based proudly on IDIC—Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations—banishing anyone from their midst for nothing more than a philosophical difference. And then there’s the absurdity of the Enterprise-A being able to reach the center of the galaxy in a few hours. And I know that’s all generally laid at the feet of Shatner, who came up with the original storyline and directed the film. I know these things and can’t really argue much with the sentiments. But consider…

After the great critical and commercial success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Paramount decided to pinch pennies on the next installment. When Nick Meyer was unable to write the script for Shatner’s storyline, they wouldn’t pay the money for the director’s choice as screenwriter, Eric Van Lustbader, instead hiring David Loughery for less money. Then Paramount refused to hire Industrial Light and Magic to do the special effects because ILM would have cost too much. It’s easy to say that Paramount just wasn’t sold on Shatner’s story, which would introduce the long-lost brother of Spock as a “televangelist” of sorts and have him convince the crew of the Enterprise to join him in his quest to find God, but if that were the case they should have just rejected the story and went with something else. They told Shatner he could direct the fifth film in the series; I doubt they told him they’d spend 40 million bucks on whatever harebrained idea he came up with. Part of the problem was that Paramount was worried they were squandering the momentum of the fourth film but an extra six months used to come up with an interesting and satisfying story as opposed to dreck is never wasted.

The good points of this film for me are all about the relationship of the Big Three—Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The scenes of them camping out in Yosemite National Park, with McCoy cursing Kirk’s “playing games with life” (the captain is climbing El Capitan without any precautions, like the jet pack Spock is wearing when we first see him) and then the campfire scenes—Spock and McCoy are priceless here—set the stage for a movie-long gag reel which make this film memorable despite the ridiculous story and events surrounding it. The three actors seem to have a genuine sense of fun at playing off each other and, while some of the humor goes a little over the top, there is such a relaxed atmosphere surrounding them that much of the trouble with the story just melts away when they’re on-screen. And this being Star Trek, you know that’s the vast majority of the film.

Unfortunately, at some point the story always intrudes, and it goes something like this: On Nimbus III, nicknamed “The Planet of Galactic Peace”, Spock’s long-lost brother Sybok uses his “I feel your pain” mind-control to gather a force to capture the Romulan, Klingon, and Federation ambassadors, who he also co-opts into joining him. He does this in the hope that the Federation will send him a Starship so he can get its crew to take him through The Great Barrier at the edge of the gal—oh, wait, that’s where The Great Barrier was in TOS but they moved it for the movies—at the CENTER of the galaxy. Why does he want to go there, you ask? Because that’s where God is, silly. The Enterprise-A is sent to rescue the hostages while a Klingon cruiser is also heading there… I think you get the idea of what happens even if you didn’t see it. Sybok, of course, gets on board the Enterprise-A and hijinks ensue.

The worst parts of the film to me are that Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov are largely wasted in this story, as is the Enterprise-A itself. Yes, they all have parts, and, yes, they all have a cute scene or two. But Scotty banging his head on the hatch was just dumb, and the Scotty-Uhura relationship was weird. Not because they have a relationship but, as with the Spock-Uhura thing of the new film, it just kinda came out of nowhere. Chekov and Sulu being lost in the woods was pretty damned funny but there was virtually nothing else in the film to recommend the two. And the ship, having just finished its shakedown cruise, is just in too bad a shape for me to believe Starfleet would have ever let it leave spacedock. The doors don’t work, the alarms malfunction, the transporter doesn’t work—even the pads on which Kirk records his logs don’t work. I just can’t believe any ship in that condition could have been cleared for service.

Despite all of the above, and a lot of other negatives I didn’t mention because I didn’t delve too deeply into the story itself, I enjoyed watching the film. And that’s really all there is to say for any piece of performance art, isn’t it?

Give your rating of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and the movies that preceded it

Previous – Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Next – Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Star Trek U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 Figurine Collection: Star Trek Fan Gift