“...to antiquity its due reverence”: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

There was a time when being the sixth film in a motion picture franchise would have been the subject of mockery. Once considered a laughingstock, a movie with five sequels all set in the same continuity is completely unheard of nowadays, being as we are in an era where it's rare to go two films without getting a full-on “reboot” or “reimagining” with a new cast and director and suspiciously returning everything else.

So Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country feels oddly and quaintly dated today. It's a film that sets about closing a story decisively for no other reason than it's the artistically and creatively right thing to do, and that's just something you won't see today in the age of Cinematic Universes that are unfinished by design and consecutive reboots within three or four years of one another that all tell variations on the same stock plot. And make no mistake, it absolutely is and does: In 1991 there were not yet any plans for a second Star Trek film series, so this was a movie made for the express purposes of thanking the fans for their support and bringing the Original Series story to a dignified close. A lot of received fan wisdom seems to posit this film was greenlit to “make up” for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which would otherwise have been the final Trek movie, but from the studio's perspective the past *three* Star Trek movies had all underperformed at the box office and they didn't see much difference between them one way or the other. But this was the 25th Anniversary, and the Star Trek film team felt something needed to be done.

(This also explains why the movie looks somewhat stunningly cheap: While I remember the VFX shots having been breathtaking and they're certainly impressive when it counts, everywhere else the fact Paramount only allowed this movie to be made if it was produced on the thinnest of shoestring budgets plainly shows. Most notably, while I slagged off Star Trek V: The Final Frontier for reusing the sets from Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's actually way more egregious in this movie. I mean, they didn't even try to hide the fact the transporter room, corridors, observation lounge and ten-forward are painfully obviously from Captain Picard's Enterprise. More on that later, actually.)

You might think a movie with that pedigree would be cripplingly fanwanky, and there are a whole slew of references on display here. But none of them feel like forced name-drops done simply for the sake of pandering. Everything feels organic and freeform, with the grand finale that takes centre stage flowing seamlessly into a prequel for the story that's playing out for us elsewhere. Leonard Nimoy and Nicholas Meyer are back behind the camera, and the end result is much of what you would expect from the team: It's Meyer's name on the director's chair, but it's clearly Nimoy's deft eye for cinematic photography that elevates the look and feel of The Undiscovered Country *substantially*: There was a chance the film could have worn its bargain-basement trappings a little too obviously, but Nimoy gives the movie a grandiose, epic sense of scale befitting the send-off of such iconic folk heroes of modern myth.

As for Nicholas Meyer...Well, his usual raft of issues apply. And let's just deal with this straight away, the mind meld scene with Valeris is completely unacceptable, but at the very least Meyer has admitted in more recent years it was a terrible, ignorant thing to write, he should have known better and wishes he could go back in time to tell his younger self not to do that. Elsewhere, Meyer is still a bit too bombastic, a bit too on-the-nose and remains frustratingly middlebrow. But this movie also sees him growing further from his surprisingly improved performance with the San Franciscan deli meat from the Star Trek sandwich that was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Meyer's characters feel a bit more naturalistic and a bit less like they're reciting from a high school English curriculum. It also helps him a lot that the entire movie seems custom-built to tailor to his brand of pomposity and because he's got a savvy partner in Leonard Nimoy he's not allowed to go quite as self-indulgent as he did in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

It also helps that Meyer has such a fantastic talent to work with in the likes of Christopher Plummer, whose scenes as Commander Chang remain a highlight of the film for me to this day. Like Christopher Lloyd before him, Plummer's got just the right balance of Shakespearean gravitas and cured pork such that his scenes are just the right level of over-the-top. He's delightfully maniacal, even...no, especially when cackling and spewing Great White Western quotes lifted from Barnes & Noble refrigerator magnets. This is probably my favourite role of Plummer's, even counting his turn as Master Arngeir in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that helped change the course of my life. That's not to discount the rest of the cast, mind, particularly William Shatner, who had served as Plummer's understudy when they were on stage together many years ago: Their chemistry is plainly on display up there.

One more thing to note about Meyer's script: The racial undertones, and rather blatant racism, on the part of the Enterprise crew has drawn a bit of scorn over the years, most significantly from Gene Roddenberry, who apparently threw a fit about it not long before his death. Although I'm not sure if the sentiment is still there, some fans back in the day felt that the Enterprise crew wouldn't hold such bigoted views. The thing is though, in my view, they absolutely would. I think it's important for us to remember here that this isn't the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew: This is the Original Series one, and that sort of utopianism isn't actually built into this story by default. This crew has fought the Klingons consistently for decades and are military officers first and foremost, *not* scientists and diplomats. This is precisely the kind of attitude this crew would hold. It's the one time Nicholas Meyer's space navy stuff, and his themes about aging, are genuinely appropriate: This crew doesn't actually know any life other than war, and they've become so set in that way of thinking that the kinds of “knowing your enemy” sentiments we talked about in “I, Borg” may actually be beyond them. In fact, the film posits that this is tacitly the main reason they need to retire.

In that respect, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is a truly bizarre 25th Anniversary special, isn't it? Most media artefacts like this are insufferably self-aggrandizing things, spending an interminable amount of time talking about how wonderful they are, how many wonderful things they've done and how many more wonderful things they have yet to do. Which, incidentally, you can be a part of if you line up to buy the newest product proudly bearing the brand name at the low, low price of your nostalgic memories of the original work. But this is a movie explicitly *about* the original work in question, and is even the brainchild of a not-insignificant number of the original creative figures. And it is unmistakably about how dated, tired and out-of-time said original work is: This is the movie all those people who worship Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for its supposedly powerful handling of aging and death need to watch, because here it's perfectly timed. Star Trek, in this form, *really doesn't* come back again after this. And it can't.

Although the film never wavers from the eminently justifiable postulate that the Original Series had a tremendously important impact on world society, nor does it waver either from its firm commitment that its time in the sun has now more than passed. The world it came into and was meant to comment on doesn't exist anymore (I don't feel the need to talk about the clear parallels with the Cold War and Berlin Wall subtext, mainly because calling it subtext is being wildly and inappropriately generous to it. This is, after all, Nicholas Meyer) and there's no more good it can do without wearing out its welcome and cheapening its own legacy. Perhaps as a collective cultural myth the Original Series will live on in perpetuity (indeed, history since this movie more or less solidifies that assertion, TOS being the only Star Trek anyone important seriously talks about anymore), if it does it will be thanks to the transformative energy of the people who love it so much they don't ever want to let it go. As an extant media artefact, the original Star Trek has finally reached its limit break.

And yet even within this, the true meaning of this presence remains clear within Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. One point of singularity and egress where all that is, all that ever was and all that ever will be exists in a single moment. This is an Original Series story, but it's an Original Series story about, if absolutely nothing else, the existence of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are having conversations in spaces that really belong to Jean-Luc Picard, Guinan and Beverly Crusher. So much so the film doesn't even make an attempt to disguise this fact. Of course, many of those sets were actually built for Star Trek Phase II and the film series first, something that was, I confess, a disappointment for me to learn. It would seem the only set that was *really* built for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: The Next Generation alone was the Enterprise bridge: The oppressive weight and shadow of the Original Series materializes even within the show's physical reality. That said, I don't think anyone watching this film would look at those rooms and think they belong anywhere else than on the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D.

Even our future role models themselves are here, deliberately haunting the narrative to remind us of where our true calling lies. There's Michael Dorn, of course, even playing a character named Worf. And it's not just Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is here too, over a full year before it's supposed to properly make its debut to the world. Dax is aboard Kirk's Enterprise (framed for murder, no less), and the man behind the conspiracy to instigate a second Klingon/Federation war is the mysterious Colonel West, who spends part of the film physically altered to resemble a Klingon. West is named and styled after Colonel Oliver North (and who else has invoked and caricatured Oliver North to skewer the heart of Star Trek at its most vulnerable?) and is played by a personal friend of Nicholas Meyer's by the name of René Auberjonois. There's also a shapeshifter named Martia who at one point assumes the visage of Captain Kirk, the erstwhile performer, to challenge him with the weight of his own celebrity image.

And last, but not least, in an iconic scene, Kirk and McCoy are tried and sentenced to Rura Penthe in the exact same manner as Jonathan Archer a century before them in one vision of reality. 

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country's version of time, strange as it might seem given the headiness of the plot, is not a linear or teleological one. It's a diffuse, dreamlike one, with visions and half-remembered stories all playing over the mindspace above and beyond the comparatively paltry media on display. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country has thus always been and always will be *my* Star Trek movie: I was vaguely aware of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home through the broader culture and caught up with them later, but this is the film I remember being in theatres. This is the film I can quote and whose setpieces I can still most vividly remember. The movie poster is one of the most iconic images from my history with Star Trek: *The* defining image representing *the* Star Trek movie.

I can still vividly remember the initial teaser trailer for this film, included in the very first home video releases of Star Trek: The Next Generation. As I was eagerly looking forward to reacquainting myself with my favourite show alongside my family in outer space, I was treated to a bittersweet tribute to a story I had never heard. A quiet, dignified and melancholy montage of unfamiliar, dissociated images of people I didn't know and places I'd never been. Even without foreknowledge or asking my parents for confirmation, I instantly and intuitively realised that this must be the “other” Star Trek I had heard about. And though I didn't know anything about who these people were or the lives they had lived (and, frankly, had no particular desire to learn) I could feel, *and appreciate*, the weight of history still.

I could sense that even though this was not my family, these people must be honoured distant relatives of ours. It's a simple little piece, but there's an uncanny, haunting familiarity about it. It reminds me of what Star Trek: The Next Generation looked like five years ago, when it was just getting started, and that set of iconography and emotions resonates with me at a very deep level. Even so, this looked just old and different enough for me to feel apart and removed from the stories being remembered. They were as strangers to me, and yet not. And so I respected them as my elders and forebearers, for I knew they were the ones who had gone before. I thank them for all they did such that me and my people could benefit from the legacy they left behind for us. If this was to be their final story, then so be it. I'm sure they had lived full, rewarding and prosperous lives and had earned it.

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river”: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

I'll be perfectly blunt. I'm *not* thrilled to be back with the Original Series cast here. The world has changed under their feet, and even though 1986 was only two years ago it seems more like an eternity. Having them slot themselves into Star Trek: The Next Generation's summer hiatus feels presumptuous, redundant and really, a bit tragically out of style: The Original Series no longer has its hands on the pulse of Star Trek, and one sort of wishes this crew world butt out and retire with dignity, especially considering how absolutely perfect an ending to their story Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was.

If there's one aspect of Star Trek's media artefact wing that demonstrates how incestuous Star Trek fandom is, it's unquestionably the Original Series and its associated characters, as, no matter what the generation, Trekkers are frustratingly unwilling (or unable) to move beyond them. This has to be something stronger than fealty to the original work or simple nostalgia, because this is a phenomenon that spans several different age groups and, more to the point, *doesn't* happen with any other franchise of comparable scope. Nobody privileges the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who above all else, for example, and while the original three Star Wars movies are considered the best, that's only because Star Wars fans are far more critical of their own franchise and will readily admit the original films hold that position merely by virtue of being slightly less shit than the others.

I'm not entirely certain what the reason for this is myself, but, either due to someone's deliberate intent or purely through a particularly horrific example of the fan-industrial complex, Star Trek: The Next Generation and its ilk have utterly failed to take substantial root in the pop consciousness such that it's the Original Star Trek, and *only* the Original Star Trek, that remains universally beloved, embraced and affectionately quoted and memified. This will be an unending sore spot for those of us (like, oh I don't know, me, for example) for whom Star Trek actually does mean Star Trek: The Next Generation, because we'll forever feel like our memories and feelings will never be considered legitimate by an *overwhelming majority* of the contemporary discourse.

The reason why this is relevant to the topic du jour is, aside from the obvious “I really, really don't want to be writing about the Original Series at the moment”, is because Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a movie that very plainly would not exist if not for the curious gravity the Original Star Trek exerts over the rest of the franchise. It was put into production essentially as a favour to William Shatner thanking him for bothering to show up for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, because he almost didn't given he was A. getting too big for Paramount to afford and B. understandably dissatisfied with the anemic and fannish Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. To entice him back, the studio promised Shatner he could direct the next movie (remember, at the time the feeling was that Star Trek had become a kind of modern-day film serial that would run in perpetuity), which wasn't actually much of a promise as Shatner already had something called a contractual “favoured nations” clause with Leonard Nimoy dating back to the Original Series. This was basically a legal endorsement of their joint leading man status, promising that whatever Shatner received, Nimoy would too. So long as Star Trek remained a film serial that Leonard Nimoy was going to be directing installments of, Paramount was legally obligated to allow William Shatner to direct some movies too.

And in this regard, in spite of my immediate profound lack of enthusiasm, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a movie I've been meaning to do a redemptive reading of for quite some time. This is by far the most hated of all the Star Trek films (which is saying something considering Star Trek Nemesis and Star Trek Into Darkness exist), and completely unjustifiably, I feel: It is unquestionably an *unnecessary* film, and it's definitely crippled by a lot of mitigating circumstances, namely a stupefying amount of executive meddling and the writer's guild strike, which seemingly ruined everything for everyone for the entirety of 1989. But this doesn't mean the entire project was a total write-off or misguided from the start, and furthermore, one of those mitigating circumstances was most assuredly *not* the one named William Shatner. For one, this was not Shatner's first directorial gig (he'd directed a number of theatrical plays and even television episodes beforehand), and given the favoured nations clause, it's not like Shatner was throwing his weight around and muscling his way into places he didn't belong or didn't have the required experience to deal with. And I don't think we want to say that actors, as a general rule, can't make the transition to directing, given what we're going to see very shortly with Jonathan Frakes.

So this means the question at hand is actually once again what *kind* of creator William Shatner is, and anyone who's followed this blog for awhile is already going to know the answer to that. Shatner delights in knowing artifice, in particular as a way of exploring different positionalities and everyday feelings. Shatner is also deeply inspired by both music and theatre and how the two creative forms compliment each other, and he's also fascinated by how different people conceptualize the divine and the transcendent. This is made most abundantly clear in The Transformed Man, which is sort of his signature work, as well as his most recent release as of this writing, Ponder the Mystery, which uses the background of prog-rock to take a tongue-in-cheek, yet earnest, look at the “big questions” everyone tends to think about every now and then. Knowing this, the impetus behind Star Trek V: The Final Frontier becomes very, very easy to explain: Shatner is quite obviously intending this to be the Star Trek version of The Transformed Man: A rumination on the connection between performativity, everyday experience and divinity with a great big fuck-off space battle with angel and demon beings and an evil alien televangelist to tick the requisite action sci-fi summer blockbuster boxes (Shatner has said he was fascinated by the charisma of televangelists and the power they wield to persuade and mislead people).

I can find nothing wrong with the underlying premise here whatsoever-In fact, I'll go so far as to say that it sounds awesome and could very will have been the greatest Star Trek movie of all time with a brief like that. And I'll defend Shatner to the hilt here because, as far as I've been able to discern, everything that went wrong with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (and let's not beat around the bush any longer, no-one is saying Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was actually executed effectively or that Paramount was able to pull it off without a hitch) was due to things that were entirely out of Shatner's control. The much-maligned humour was not his idea as Shatner intended Star Trek V: The Final Frontier to be a serious drama, but the studio wanted another comedy because Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had been so successful and was a comedy. And when you tell William Shatner to do comedy, he's going to do it in the most broad-strokes and Vaudevillian way possible because that's what he knows (see, for example, “I, Mudd”) The blatant Star Wars references that take up the whole first part of the movie before the actual plot gets going were also a studio request, because Paramount once again felt they needed to be competing with Lucasfilm. It also couldn't have helped matters that the guy they got to tweak the screenplay stopped working halfway through pre-production due to the writer's strike.

But the biggest thing that sunk this movie before it got going has got to be an egregious philosophical disagreement about what a blockbuster science fiction movie ought to be allowed to do. When William Shatner asked Harve Bennett to look over his script, the producer took issue with the entire tone and structure of the project, saying it wasn't enough of an adventure story and didn't even feel like much of a movie. Bennett said Shatner's pitch “had the feeling of a tone poem” instead of a sci-fi blockbuster, convincing Shatner to start a lengthy (and ultimately unfinished) editing and revision process. This right here is the most revealing aspect of this movie's tortured production history: A tone poem, or symphonic poem, is a piece of (typically classical) music specifically meant to evoke some exterior work of art, like a landscape painting, a novel, or indeed a poem. Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss are the most famous composers of tone poems, though a notable modern example would be Paul McCartney's album Standing Stone. Now we get at the root of the problem with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: William Shatner approached it the same way he does all his other artistic ventures, as a hybrid fusion of music and spoken-word theatre that attempts to reach some higher form of artistic expression, and Paramount either didn't understand what he was actually trying to do or flatly didn't think it was translatable to a Hollywood blockbuster.

And this really is a uniquely Hollywood impasse because it is uniquely Western. Other artistic traditions don't see the same disconnect between narrative and other sorts of creative expression, and all we need to do is look across the pond at Japan and its proud tradition of stylized music and dance theatre, such as Kabuki and Takarazuka. Just relatively recently we've seen how contemporary Japanese creators were pushing the boundaries of their medium by completely redefining what science fiction could (and really should) be. Just take a look at the MTV-spectacle-as-transcendent-experience Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture was grasping at, or the multi-layered performativity linking back to pro wrestling that defines Dirty Pair in general. I'd suggest Shatner take a trip to Tokyo and meet with someone like Kōji Morimoto, Kōichi Mashimo or Mamoru Oshii who probably would get him a little better, except I wonder if Shatner's innovations might come across as obvious to people that radical and visionary. William Shatner's constant problem is that he's pretty much always in the wrong place at the wrong time: He's shaped by the Western theatrical tradition, but he's constantly up against its limitations. His peers are incapable of taking him seriously, not just because of his connection to Star Trek, but because they really don't understand what the hell he's actually trying to say. Furthermore, the people who probably *should* be his peers might be beyond even him.

Either way, Bennett is wrong not just because we know the kind of thinker William Shatner is, but because even within Hollywood there's a precedent for what Shatner was trying to do with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Indeed, the Long 1980s are pretty much the perfect time for this movie: It's already been seven years since Blade Runner, which was nothing if not a first draft for the kind of cinema Shatner is trying to pioneer here, and then there's the small matter of the film that knocked Star Trek V: The Final Frontier from its number one spot at the box office (yes, in spite of its reputation, this film actually did pretty well in its first week): Batman, a decisive victory for aesthetic power within even the pulpiest of source material (indeed, Harve Bennett's probable fatal flaw as a creator is his unwavering commitment to painfully dated pulp tropes and structures and inability to see beyond them). There's also Miami Vice, of course, which has a leg-up on pretty much all of the other examples by also having an actually compelling plot, effortlessly demonstrating that it and groundbreaking visual design are not mutually exclusive.

And really, if there's one thing Star Trek V: The Final Frontier lacks its visual design, which is kind of a problem for a movie like this: Due to a dispute with ILM, Paramount hired “some guy in New York” (Brian Ferren, of tiny VFX firm Associates and Ferren) to do the effects, and the result is something that, perhaps appropriately, would not have looked out of place on the Original Series. Herman Zimmerman from Star Trek: The Next Generation stepped in to help, redesigning the bridge to provide continuity with that of the current Enterprise and gave the team some of Mike Okuda's trademark LCARS displays, but his heroic efforts sadly don't help much. Speaking of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the rest of the interior sets are all reuses of those from that show, which the movie nicely does not make any attempt to disguise whatsoever. Similarly, *yet another* reuse of the overplayed theme to Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the final straw that breaks the camel's back. That theme never, *ever* needs to be used again, and it even led to some confusion from new Star Trek fans (ahem) who thought the movie team was stealing the theme song to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And that kind of returns us to our original point. The looming presence of Star Trek: The Next Generation is undeniable and unavoidable. Absolutely nobody was contesting where the present and future of Star Trek in 1989 lay, or at least nobody who should have been in the position of making decisions. Even within the movie itself, during in the infamous El Capitan scene Spock seems to be acting more like Data than the Spock of the original Star Trek. Although some fans are quick to point the finger at the show's floundering in its second season as a reason this movie turned out to be such a disappointment (believing that potential viewers took their frustration with Star Trek: The Next Generation out on it) that strikes me as nothing more than passing the blame onto an unpopular creative team. I don't know what the fan opinion of Star Trek: The Next Generation at the time was, but I do know what the popular opinion was: It was still one of the most watched and beloved shows on the air. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation ended its first season as the number one show in syndication, and I don't believe it was hemorrhaging viewers throughout its second. So, if die-hard Trekkies weren't watching the show (perhaps out of some lingering suspicion of it or fear their childhood heroes were being replaced), the fact remains that normal people were still watching, and those were the people Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was aimed at. Well, at least I'm presuming it was, considering Paramount's constant meddling in Shatner's pitch basically amounted to asking him to dumb it down. The bottom line here is that Star Trek V: The Final Frontier did not “almost kill” Star Trek like everyone likes to hyperbolically claim: Star Trek: The Next Generation was *always* going to come back for a third season regardless of what this deeply confused and ultimately inconsequential movie did, it's just that nobody writing historical narratives wanted to admit that Star Trek: The Next Generation was the real future.

This botched, ham-fisted and yet paradoxically confrontational conflation of the two different Star Trek “generations” is a perfect encapsulation of the dangers this franchise keeps running up against: In its harried attempt to please both veteran fans and newcomers, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier ends up crippled and unable to please anyone. Even Gene Roddenberry denounced it, which says something as it takes a lot to get Gene Roddenberry to speak out against Star Trek (although Roddenberry was likely just jealous because William Shatner had the same basic idea for this movie that he did for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, except Shatner actually has talent). D.C. Fontana was upset with the finished product too, for unrelated reasons, though let's be honest-Nobody at Paramount cared about what D.C. Fontana wanted by this point.

And this is the greatest tragedy of all, not just because William Shatner has been given the runaround yet again, but because this movie is concrete proof of how out-of-touch Star Trek actually is with its audience and with itself. This series has absolutely no idea what its real strengths actually are, reaches people in spite of rather than because of what it does and is totally incapable of seeing what it needs to become in order to evolve beyond what it is now.

“I was quite the swinger back in my day”: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

The 1980s were a good time for someone with a developing interest in oceanography. In 1984, archaeologist Barry Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship captained by Black Sam Bellamy during the Golden Age of Piracy, off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, a stretch of coastline that's a notorious navigation hazard and the site of many wrecks. It's also a coastline that happens to be six hours away from me and a place I consider a second home. The discovery of the Whydah by Clifford and his team was the result of an extensive search up and down Cape Cod's Atlantic coast and marks the first, and to date only time, an authentic pirate shipwreck has been located by marine explorers. Clifford founded a museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts (just north of Wellfleet) dedicated to Bellamy and the Whydah that remains open to this day, and while he's a local hero in New England, neither him nor the story remains well known outside of the region.

In 1985, Robert Ballard and a team of oceanographers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod made world headlines by locating the much sought-after wreck of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic. Ballard's discovery captured the imagination of people all over the world (myself included), it remains possibly the most famous exploration and recovery mission in the history of oceanography, and the story of the Titanic would inspire director James Cameron to create one of the two highest-grossing movies of all time over a decade later. It's since been revealed Ballard's expedition was actually a front, and that throughout 1985 he had been secretly in the temporary employ of the United States Navy. The true purpose of his mission to clandestinely search for two missing US submarines, the USS Scorpion and USS Thresher, which had sunk in the same waters in the 1960s before they got to test the experimental nuclear reactors they had been outfitted with.

Also in 1985, a humpback whale nicknamed Humphrey attracted heavy media attention after he got “lost”, travelling through the Golden Gate to end up in San Francisco Bay. Marine biologists grew concerned when he further deviated from his normal migratory patterns by swimming up the freshwater Sacramento River before getting himself trapped at the other end of the Rio Vista Bridge, putting his life in danger. In order to get Humphrey to safety, humpback researcher Louis Herman and acoustical engineer Bernie Krause played recorded songs of whales feeding on high-power underwater speakers provided by the US Navy to get Humphrey to retrace his steps and return to the Pacific Ocean. My interest in whale songs and whale behaviour was fostered by the story of Humphrey (adapted into a wonderful book called Humphrey the Lost Whale) and other whales in the news at the time (including the sadly near-annual tradition of pilot whale beaching themselves on Cape Cod), helped cultivate my interest in the ocean and a living ecosystem and is but one facet of the link I share with it.

At first glance, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home looks for all the world like Star Trek finally deciding to say something about the environmentalist movement, about ten or twenty years too late. The now ex-Enterprise crew has to travel back in time to 1986 to retrieve a pair of humpback whales, the species having gone extinct in the 21st century and a probe from the outer reaches of the universe has come looking to talk to them and keeps turning up the frequency of its message to dangerous degrees because it can't understand why it can't get any kind of response. Spock's constant comments about the illogical shortsightedness of hunting a species to extinction and Gillian Taylor's fiery and impassioned dedication to her cause at least place this movie on the right side of the issue, though in truth The Voyage Home's environmentalism is pretty superficial. There's not a whole lot of actual marine science on display here, and most of the rationale behind saving the whales the characters discuss amounts to “it's mean not to”. This isn't bad in the slightest and I'm not about to drag Star Trek across the coals for delivering a positive message in a soft way in a world where the collected works of Margaret Armen exist, but this does mean we probably ought to re-examine what this movie actually is.

What it is, first off, is a Star Trek sandwich. Being Star Trek, the production history naturally resembles a patchwork quilt knitted by seventeen different seamsters, none of whom knew what anyone else was doing and one of whom lived on the Moon. The beginning and end of the movie, that is, the parts set in the Star Trek universe's “present” and deal overtly with tying up the film serial's threads, were written by Harve Bennett, while the bits in the middle, the action in 1980s San Francisco, was helmed by Nicholas Meyer, no less. That is, by the way, after the initial four or five drafts were rejected and Paramount went through a bunch of writers. What's notable about the Bennett-penned stuff is, actually, how incredibly dull it is: We spend what's got to be a half-hour watching Starfleet people look at screens, Spock playing Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! on his Vulcan Nintendo WiiU and everyone else recapping the plot of the last two movies. Special demerits have to go to the scenes in the Federation council chamber, which basically amounts to a bunch of dignitaries having a right old laugh at the silly Klingon ambassador thinking he has grievances to air at the Federation. It basically nails the coffin on any idea that Kruge from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was supposed to be a problematization of the Federation's authority and presumptuousness.

(This is not helped by Bennett writing Kirk and crew as the noblest of noble, heroically enduring suffering and sacrifice for the good of the universe. It almost feels like this isn't the work of an old Star Trek veteran, but a fan coming to the series with pre-existing notions of its gravity and importance.)

Speaking of The Search for Spock, this is also the moment where Robin Curtis' Saavik is finally unceremoniously dropped off a bridge, staying behind on Vulcan for reasons that go entirely unspecified. Well, actually that's not quite true-They do go specified in Bennett's original draft for this portion of the movie, which would have had Saavik stayed behind on Vulcan because she was pregnant after her escapade with Spock on the Genesis Planet in the last movie. I really don't think I need to elabourate on why this would have been such a catastrophically horrendous idea, so I'll just once again stress that Saavik was originally supposed to be Star Trek's new lead in Star Trek II, got demoted to a support role in Star Trek III and Spock was explicitly her teacher and at least several decades her senior. Thank goodness director Leonard Nimoy stepped in and had that scene cut. In the finished film, Saavik's exit is insulting, but at least it's not as unbelievably offensive and repugnant as it could have been I suppose.

No, it's without question the time travel story that's the real highlight here. Perhaps surprisingly, considering his work on Wrath of Khan could charitably be called “amateurish”, Nicholas Meyer's section of the film is a largely unqualified triumph. Maybe it helps him to be working with a far more skilled director and to be limited to writing contemporary dialog, but the parts of Voyage Home set in San Francisco are generally an absolute joy and rightfully considered among the best of Star Trek's film offerings. Given its emphasis on marine biology and conservation, you'd think that would elevate the movie for me and it does: I'd definitely call it my favourite of the Star Trek films we've revisited so far. And yet oceanography is not actually one of Voyage Home's central themes (indeed, it's so little of a theme that we get puzzling decisions like redressing the Monterey Bay Aquarium as the “San Francisco Cetacean Institute” when there actually is a Marine Mammal Center in Marin County). Instead, what this movie really is, conceptually, is an update of “Tomorrow is Yesterday”.

While the main impetus for the time travel is different (the original pitch amounted to “there's something the Federation needs that can only be found in the 1980s” and the story is about purposefully going back to the past to save the future instead of escaping it), the structure is broadly similar, as both “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and Voyage Home have the crew time displaced and interacting with contemporary Earth in a humorously awkward and stilted way. Voyage Home comes across as superior in this regard purely because it builds off of the groundwork laid in Search for Spock in putting all of the characters, not just Kirk and Spock, on the same level, and it does so in leaps and bounds. Not only does each and every character get a moment to shine, they each get their own subplot that's integral to the final resolution. Never before or since has this cast been depicted this way, and everyone rises to the challenge eagerly and formidably: Everyone remembers Chekov and Uhura stumbling around Alameda looking for the “Nuclear Wessels”, or Scotty and McCoy inventing transparent aluminum with a Gen. 1 Macintosh (I had that computer, by the way). In “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, by contrast, only Kirk gets to play around in 1967, with the rest of the bridge crew relegated to pushing buttons and watching viewscreens.

That's not to say the choice to make the MacGuffin humpback whales was completely arbitrary, though: Nimoy picked them because he felt whale songs would give the film an “air of mystery”, and the film does pick up on this. The probe is one of my favourite ideas in all of Star Trek: This big, mysterious thing that suddenly appears out of nowhere, returns just as quickly and remains a completely incomprehensible and unknowable enigma. Likewise, the scene of it travelling through the solar system making the Federation's science stations go all wonky is one of my favourite sequences in the franchise too. It's the first moment I can say Star Trek truly and indisputably (and successfully) hits cosmic wonder. There's also the tiniest flash of the mystical and Fortean here too: Some people might scoff at the idea of cetaceans being a highly advanced intelligence with ties to the extragalactic realm (though curiously nobody seems to mind when Douglas Adams does it), but there is at least one account I've read where eyewitnesses report seeing whales and dolphins going wild in the presence of a UFO hovering over the ocean. I remember being reminded of this account the first time I saw this film and thinking how clever it was Star Trek seemed to be acknowledging that. In hindsight it probably wasn't intentional, but it's a fun motif to graft onto the movie either way.

Though the conservation message is there, the real purpose in sending the former Enterprise crew back in time is to re-examine Star Trek's utopianism with the renewed scrutiny the perspective of the 1980s provides us. In his own terrific review of Voyage Home, Jack Graham points out how the movie tells the story of relics from the utopianism of the 1960s forced to wander through Reagan's Neoconservative United States. This ties back into the wave of nostalgia for Star Trek and other pop culture artefacts like it that must have been circulating at the time: Voyage Home is essentially about digging up Star Trek and throwing it up against the modern world to see if it's still worth hanging onto in 1986. So, how does Star Trek's flavour of idealism and vision for the future stack up in 1986?

Well, one consequence of Nicholas Meyer handling this portion of the movie is that some of his trademark top-down heavy-handedness does work its way into the film: The worst example is probably when Spock questions Kirk about profanity on the bus, and he responds by saying “That's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you if you don't swear every other word”. The implication, of course, is that Star Trek's refined and elegant future would have no need for such vulgarities, being as they are the province of uneducated commoners. So that's pretty bourgeois and classist. Then there's the scene (also on the bus), with the punk and the boom box, which is about as bad and predictable as people have said it is. And Meyer, being Meyer, can't resist throwing in pointlessly showy name-drops to Shakespeare, Melville and D.H. Lawrence, because he wants to make it perfectly clear to us that he thinks he's more intellectual and well-read than we are.

(Speaking of Star Trek's futurism, and I don't think this has ever been commented on before, but I think The Voyage Home may be the very first time in the history of the franchise where it's stated the Original Series is supposed to take place in the 23rd Century, and that money no longer exists in that time. This makes sense not just given Meyer's perspective, but because this movie also marks Mike Okuda's Star Trek debut, and it's Okuda who created the official Star Trek Chronology for “The Neutral Zone”. On a related note, Spock's behaviour in this movie was totally the template for Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

So this isn't looking terribly good. Star Trek is coming back for its own nostalgia theme party and still seems to be clinging to its dangerously outmoded paternalistic upper class white attitudes. It still seems to think it can swoop down from On High and tell us all how to live our lives, even though the world is a vastly different place and it never even had the right to do that in the first place. But The Voyage Home's production tribulations actually bail Meyer out on this one, because the key character here is Gillian Taylor. Though her part was originally written for Eddie Murphy in what is admittedly one of the franchise's biggest missed opportunities, Catherine Hicks is absolutely phenomenal: She's defiant, commanding and sprightly and a more then effective comic performer. She immediately gels with the rest of the cast (especially William Shatner and James Doohan) and outright demands to be heard and taken seriously as an equal at every opportunity, both in and out of character. Hicks turns Taylor into a complete subversion of the girl-of-the-week role she's expected to play, making decisions out of her passion for whales and for the future-Not at all for Kirk, whom she mostly regards as a well-meaning, but washed up, guy who's past his prime.

This is why Taylor is the lynchpin to everything here. The biggest criticism leveled against her, and one Meyer himself raised, is that her decision to accompany the ex-Enterprise crew back to the future invalidates a valuable message about taking responsibility to foster material social progress in the present. In essence, an escape into a utopian dream (and indeed, given Star Trek's age and attitude, one that may well be outdated) with no commitment to work towards making it a reality. Meyer is, predictably, wrong. Remember, the whole point of Voyage Home was from the start that there's something we have in 1986 the utopian Star Trek future lacks and is in dire need of: Taylor doesn't represent an escape into fantasy or an embrace of retrograde ideals, she represents the utopian ideals of the 1980s and the reason she's so important is because she reminds Star Trek that it needs them. That Star Trek needs her. On a textual level, Taylor herself points out that nobody in the crew's time knows anything about humpback whales, and there's nobody more qualified than her to teach them. And remember, this whole mess started because there were no whales in the future for the probe to talk to and the Federation had no clue what to do. Gillian is going to work for a better future because she's going to work to make Star Trek better.

(Oh yes, Gillian absolutely belongs in the 23rd Century. Which is why I adore it when Chris Claremont brings her back for the Original Series graphic novel he wrote for DC in the 1990s. She doesn't have a huge role, but Claremont clearly writes her as the only person who can act as Kirk's true equal and foil: She's the new, improved, platonic Carol Marcus. I always felt Gillian should have gotten a position on the new Enterprise as a natural sciences officer and was beyond livid when neither Star Trek V or Star Trek VI acknowledged her existence. Especially because the heartwarming scene in San Francisco bay at the end of the movie unquestionably casts her as a member of the family.)

And that's why this is such a terrific time travel story. Star Trek's re-emergence in the 1980s has revealed it to be something of a dinosaur: It's very telling Kirk and Spock's cover story is that they're homeless and burned out Berkeley hippies from the 1960s (hell, they don't even have the Enterprise anymore). As Gillian says, they're “hard luck cases” and it's tough not to have a soft spot for them. In allowing Gillian to come back to the future with the crew, Star Trek is admitting that it's a bit faded and out of its time, but, more importantly, it's making us a promise that it knows this and is willing to learn and grow with the times. It's something Star Trek has always said, but it's vitally important that it says this again now when history has definitively moved beyond it and Star Trek has officially become retro. It's the exact message the franchise needed to convey at this point in time, and it's a true laugh riot to boot. It's no surprise that in spite of its quirks and imperfections The Voyage Home became the most popular and successful Star Trek movie ever. Gillian Taylor brought whales to Star Trek, and Will Riker will someday make an offhand comment about a “cetacean ops” on *his* USS Enterprise.

Speaking of...The Voyage Home did so unexpectedly well that Paramount thought the time was finally right to bring Star Trek back to television. But, given the actors' salaries coming off of four feature films made them prohibitively expensive for a television budget, they decided to start fresh with a new cast. And, to everyone's surprise, they announced Gene Roddenberry, D.C. Fontana, Dave Gerrold and Bob Justman would be back in the production offices.

The Next Generation is finally about to be born.

“...through death and life together”: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Let's be perfectly honest here. This movie exists for only one reason, and it's obviously well aware of this itself as well.

So, right away we have a situation that's manifestly different than last time. To the point where Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn't really even a film it's possible to critique: It's quite clearly not trying to be anything other than what it self-evidently is: Episode two of what's become an unfolding serial. I'll return to this theme a bit later, but first of all, there's a curious observation I'd like to make here: If Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a B-movie that didn't want to admit it was a B-movie, this film, by contrast and inversely, is a B-movie that doesn't actively try to punch above its weight class, but somehow succeeds in doing so anyway. Yes, against all odds, I'd have to say this is the best Star Trek movie we've looked at to date.

Part of this is that, unlike the previous two efforts, this movie actually feels like Star Trek. From Kirk's opening Captain's Log recap of the events of the last film's climax and aftermath, there's a heart to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock utterly absent in either of its predecessors. Kirk isn't just blatantly stating emotions and themes like he's reading from the SparkNotes version of the script, he actually seems like he's experiencing those emotions and attempting to deal with them. Kirk, and everyone else in this movie, feels like an actual character this time instead of a mouthpiece spouting Big Important Themes. It helps that the dialogue is considerably more naturalistic this time around, but I think what really salvages the show here are the actors themselves, who seem visibly energized in a way I don't really think I've ever seen this cast behave before. Sure, they've conveyed loyalty, friendship and camaraderie and all those Important Star Trek Buzzwords in the past, but this is the first time they seem to openly embody and embrace them (or at least the first time since Star Trek: The New Voyages) and this gets written back into their performances: There's a genuine, heartfelt sense that they finally understand why what they're doing is so important.

Which is only fitting considering this movie is ultimately about the fact Star Trek is a beloved thing important to many people. The reaction to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan supposedly was what convinced Leonard Nimoy to come out of retirement again, and request the directorial gig on this film to boot (Nimoy, by the way, is a thoroughly capable director, makes an utterly more visually interesting film than young Nicholas Meyer did and paves the way for future Star Trek actors to make the switch to behind-the-camera work too). This translates to a genuine sense of fun in front of the camera, with each of the principle characters getting plenty of moments to be funny or do something cool (Uhura's scene in the transporter room is an absolute moment of triumph: Seriously, you want to just cheer for Nichelle Nichols). For the first time in twenty years (or at the very least least since “Beyond the Farthest Star”) this cast actually feels like a true ensemble and the Enterprise crew finally feels like the family and community Star Trek always wanted us to think it was: Quite fitting for the themes this movie is working with elsewhere.

It also helps a lot that this movie actually looks like a movie: The special effects are all very good and both they and the general cinematography feel suitably cinematic in scope. The new designs are fantastic: Spacedock is a truly breathtaking thing to behold (though I actually prefer it when Star Trek: The Next Generation lifts the footage of it for use as Starbase 74 in “11001001” four years later) and the Klingon Bird-of-Prey is a really slick-looking ship that's shot to look menacing and cool. There is far, far less obvious CSO hackery than there was in the previous efforts and though it reuses just as many sets as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan did (most of the Spacedock interiors are redresses of Enterprise sets, as are, obviously, the bridges of the Excelsior and the Grissom) it's not so blatantly phoned in this time and that, combined with the new sets that actually were built, allow Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to do a very good job conveying the feeling of a large, expansive Star Trek universe without resorting to demanding a hideously overblown budget.

However, that said, and granting that I really actually did enjoy watching this movie, there's a lot of things about it I found annoying. Saavik is an obvious causality (so is David, literally so, but he's part and parcel of the same problem). Yes, it's a shame Kirstie Alley couldn't come back (there are conflicting stories as to why: Either she was afraid of being typecast or her agent demanded more money than Paramount could afford to pay, without Alley's knowledge) but Robin Curtis makes a perfectly serviceable Vulcan and she goes on to become one of Star Trek's most admirably workmanlike go-to guest actors. Though in a way I'm glad Alley didn't come back, because this movie is the beginning of a systematic process to take Saavik, once clearly marked as the new leading lady of Star Trek, and shunt her to the margins of the Original Series story. She doesn't have much more of a role here than to get stranded on the Genesis planet, kidnapped by Klingons and to take care of Baby Spock.

(And, it should be noted, take part in what has got to be the least erotic sex scene in the entire history of cinema. The ramifications of this will prove absolutely dire, but we'll deal with that when we revisit the Original Series story in a couple years.)

The sad reality is that making an entire movie about “getting the band back together” does nothing but contribute further to the ossification of the Original Series status quo as “the way things are supposed to be”. As good as the original cast is here, the guest cast is positively shafted, with two major exceptions: The first is James B. Sikking as Captain Styles of the Excelsior, who does a delightfully tongue-in-cheek sketch comedy version of a military commander, strutting up and down his bridge with a baton and just generally looking stuffy and pompous. Seriously, were this movie a Monty Python sketch you could totally imagine John Cleese or Graham Chapman playing him. The other is, of course, Christopher Lloyd as Lord Commander Kruge, who is amazing. OK, so for people who haven't seen this movie...Imagine Doc Brown from Back to the Future as a Klingon warlord...And that's exactly how Lloyd plays Kruge here. But what makes his turn really genius is that Lloyd is a good enough actor that he can switch between campy, overblown manic gurning and deathly serious emotional gravity.

Which is precisely what the character of Kruge needs, because there's a secret story to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock that both hints at a much greater film this could have been and is further evidence of the increasingly narrow channels at least this version of Star Trek is being forced into. See, if you strip away all the maniacal, B-movie scheming, explosions and fisticuffs, the fact is that Kruge is actually *right* here: He doesn't want to use the Genesis device to conquer new worlds for the Klingon Empire, he wants to steal it so the Federation doesn't have it anymore, rightly recognising it as the Doomsday device it really is. Think about it: This is a bomb that can level entire planets...and then reshape them any way the Federation wants. It's the ultimate wet dream of the Federation's darkest, most imperialistic unspoken desires. Kruge immediately, and correctly, recognises this as evidence the Federation has become the most dangerous threat in the galaxy and takes it upon himself to put a stop to it for the safety and sovereignty of the other non-aligned cultures. With a few minor dialogue edits, Kruge could have been an utterly sympathetic tragic hero, and, to his credit, Lloyd almost gets there all by himself just working with the material he's given.

And this is exactly what Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was supposed to be about. Kruge was originally going to be a Romulan character on par with the commander from “Balance of Terror” (hence why he has a Bird-of-Prey) and he and Kirk were going to have an actually serious, intelligent and mature debate about the ethics of the Federation developing this kind of weapon. And remember, this is also the story where the crew basically commits high treason, stealing the Enterprise and violating every single regulation to save Spock's life, finally placing friendship and morality above their careers and Federation interest. No wonder this is pegged as “The Final Voyage of the Starship Enterprise”: Not only is the ship itself destroyed (in what is admittedly a rather hollow and transparently obvious attempt to drum up drama in a similar way to Spock's death in the last movie), but this film finally marks the point where Star Trek rejects its own ethics to try and become something different. Sarek is right: Kirk and crew have saved Spock, but at the cost of the Enterprise, their careers and David's life. It's possible this movie too could have served as the ultimate capstone to the Original Series story had it wanted to.

(There is also, of course, the inherent Pop Christianity implicit in stating Spock has an "immortal soul", which is worth a brief mention. So I'll mention it. This makes a curious contrast with the Hollywood faux-Eastern trappings the Vulcans exhibit elsewhere in this movie.) 

But of course, as is maddeningly so often the case with Star Trek, that's not quite the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock actually is. It comes very close, and the actors put in a Herculean effort here (especially the main cast and Christopher Lloyd), but this still ultimately remains a fun space action B-movie about how wonderful Star Trek is, and not just Star Trek, but a very *specific* kind of Star Trek. The Original Series was never going to end here any more than it was going to end with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: As the end credits state, “And The Adventure Continues”. Star Trek is back (and not just Star Trek, but Star Trek) and is blasting off to a new set of adventures that will be just like the old ones (or rather, how you remember the old ones to be) except now they're on the big screen. You can almost imagine seeing a bunch of text scrolling onscreen after the ending saying things like “How will Admiral Kirk and his friends escape Vulcan? Tune in next time for more exciting adventures in Outer Space!”.

Along those lines, it's interesting to note that Star Trek III: The Search for Spock marks the point where Star Trek swings so far back to its Pulp sci-fi roots it actually manages to resurrect the film serial style of storytelling, which is oddly fitting coming in the wake of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. As much as Star Trek fans may not like to admit it, this franchise really was playing catch-up and follow-the-leader for pretty much the entire decade between 1977 and 1987. But this just further reaffirms my belief that the Original Series is becoming more and more of an intellectual dead end: At this point, it seems to exist primarily as comfort food for a specific subset of Trekkers who both adamantly refuse to move on and who are for whatever reason unwilling to take the series into their own hands, despite repeated pleas to do precisely that.

(Speaking of reification and ossification, this also, of course, marks the point where that begins to happen to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Even though this film ultimately undoes everything that movie tried to do, it still holds it in a kind of reverence: The reused soundtrack, the stock footage of the climax that opens this movie and the constant invocation of it as arc words speak quite clearly to that. Flatly, Star Trek had finally done something massively popular, and now the franchise was never going to let anyone forget that ever again.)

There's a lot to love about Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Truly, there is. But, yet again, it's a bunch of good ideas and successful parts taken individually that never quite add up to a great whole, and it still continuously manages to fall short of its potential. And honestly, I'm kind of tired of constantly having to say that.

“Khan, nothing more?”: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

I don't like it.

Yeah, I said it. As far as I'm concerned, the consensus-best Star Trek EVER is a bunch of *ridiculously* overrated tat. But honestly, you must have expected this by now. Was there really ever any suspense over how I was going to read this? Surely, there was no way I was ever going to taken in by Star Trek going whole hog into Horatio Hornblower naval pomp and circumstance? Not after everything I've yelled and screamed about here for the past year. I think it's a mistake, I think it gets Star Trek's philosophy utterly wrong, I honestly don't think its a particularly captivating movie in its own right and I can't in good conscience recommend it. So there. You can all close the book or the browser tab or whatever, as I'm sure my yay or nay on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what you've been waiting breathlessly all this time to find out about.

Anyone still here? Good. Then we can continue.

The first, most obvious problem I have with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is in fact bringing Khan back in the first place. “Space Seed” was an utterly abhorrent episode that posited Star Trek's utopian future would be built on the back of Philosopher Kings and enlightened despots who benevolently oppress us while they squabble over turf by manipulating catastrophic gang wars and indulging in extravagant, overblown dick measuring contests. It also made the passionate claim that women gain their inner strength through submissiveness and subservience and that rape culture is the natural hierarchy of humanity. And Khan himself was a spectacularly racist amalgamation of generically “exotic” nonwhite, nonwestern motifs the script bewilderingly seems to think will add to his “charm”. Charm, incidentally, is the one thing Khan wasn't hurting for simply because the show hired Ricardo Montalbán to play him, who was an amazing stage presence and the one likable thing in that whole dreadful hour.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan does at least manage to be better than “Space Seed” as it drops pretty much all of the symbolism and themes Khan was originally written with in mind, bringing him back simply to exert gravity as a powerful antagonist, which is a role he's perfectly suited for. No, Khan does work here, which is more than can be said for any of his other appearances in Star Trek, but the problem this movie has is that, by virtue of being so obviously a sequel (something I'll talk more about later on) and because it was so phenomenally well received, this retroactively makes “Space Seed” seem like it was actually a good idea to any generation of Trekker who grew up with this movie, and in doing so renders both stories completely untouchable. And *that* has done provable harm to Star Trek's legacy, because any version of Star Trek that takes “Space Seed” as the definitive display of its philosophy is a Star Trek that's inherently wrongheaded and toxic.

I'm not going to talk about the plot or anything like that: Everyone knows it by heart, even the plot holes, of which there are about a billion. No, the chronology doesn't make any sense. No, it's never explained why the most seasoned crew in the fleet is running cadet training simulations when the last time we saw them they were gearing up for a new five-year mission (though the expanded universe helps out a lot here: You're frankly spoiled for choice when it comes to stories set between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). No, Chekov shouldn't know who Khan is. And no, Khan's behaviour in regards to both Kirk and Marla McGivers doesn't make an ounce of sense. The thing is though, none of this actually matters because it's very clear this movie is meant to be a retcon in everything but name.

In spite of the fact it did make money, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was considered a critical failure, and Gene Roddenberry (rightfully) got the blame for it and was kicked upstairs basically permanently, to be replaced with a guy famous for getting paid to write Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Bringing in Nicholas Meyer is the biggest creative shift the franchise has experienced since Gene Coon came on as executive producer, and it would make sense this film would want to distance itself from its predecessor any way it could. You can see this everywhere in Wrath of Khan, from the tone and obvious naval epic influence to its loose attitude to continuity: This is a movie that's more interested in Star Trek as a cultural object than it is in any kind of established Star Trek universe. Even the aging and death themes tie into this, with Wrath of Khan feeling very much like an attempt to pass the torch to a possible new kind of Star Trek (Saavik is the key character here, as she's obviously the protagonist and obviously The New Spock).

What Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan really wants is to be a new big screen debut for the franchise, to the point it even (likely unintentionally) recycles beat-for-beat a lot of the key scenes from “In Thy Image” that were left out of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, such as McCoy trying to coax Kirk to get back in the captain's chair, and then an emergency forcing him to. Seriously, fuse Decker with Chapel and then replace them with Saavik and Admiral Nogura with Spock (and strip out absolutely all of Alan Dean Foster's utopian themes) and you've got essentially the same setup. One way to read this movie then is an alternate version of where Star Trek Phase II would have tried to go had it been made, which is basically the only thing that could possibly excuse the fact that practically the whole first half of the damn movie is stock footage from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

(And yet that said, Wrath of Khan is *also*, bewilderingly and paradoxically, the most continuity-heavy Star Trek has been yet: It requires the audience to know, for example, who Khan is and how Vulcans work. There is very little exposition of any kind here. As much as it's trying to reboot the series, it also remains firmly committed to the idea of an established canon and pleasing longtime Trekkers, and that's going to prove to be catastrophic to its overall effectiveness.)

But that's not the major issue here. On the Memory Alpha wiki, there is a *lengthy* section in the article for this movie called “Analysis”, dedicated to exploring Wrath of Khan's apparently extremely heady and complex themes such as “Age”, “Vengeance” and “Death”. This is the only Star Trek work that is given such an in-depth treatment, so obviously Trekkers, at least the Trekkers who edit Memory Alpha, think this movie is more intelligent and sophisticated than any other Star Trek, a prospect that I find gravely concerning, as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the most childishly obtuse and obvious this franchise has been since Gene Roddenberry was running it in 1966.

This movie reads like a high school English essay with the characters blatantly reciting the CliffNotes of the movie's Major Themes. It has absolutely all of the overblown and silly Big Important Speeches people accuse The Dark Knight of having, and is no more subtle when it comes to blocking and visual symbolism. I was particularly impressed with the cut in the cargo container, made as dramatically and noticeable as possible, to Khan's literature collection, which contains such obscure rarities like King Lear, Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick, helpfully reminding us precisely what he's supposed to symbolize and how we're supposed to read him just in case any of the audience had fallen asleep or happened to actually be Vulcans.

Roderick Long will want me to mention that, since this movie is basically “Star Trek Does Moby-Dick (Again)”, there's a useful redemptive reading of that book courtesy of Trotskyist and post-colonialist writer C.L.R. James we can apply that basically sees Starbuck and Ahab as representing two sides of capitalism, with the former symbolizing prudence and the latter symbolizing obsessive totalitarianism. James has a famous quote here, stating that

“For generations people believed that the men opposed to rights of ownership, production for the market, domination of money, etc. were socialists, communists, radicals of some sort united by the fact that they all thought in terms of the reorganization of society by the workers, the great majority of the oppressed, the exploited, the disinherited...Nobody, not a single soul, thought that in the managers, the superintendents, the executives, the administrators would arise such loathing and bitterness against the society of free enterprise, the market and democracy, that they would try to reorganize it to suit themselves, and, if need be, destroy civilization in the process.”

This is what James sees Ahab as: Someone who, while a product of the capitalistic system, embodies its worst excesses and resents the way it prevents him from attaining absolute control. And furthermore, someone whose extremist sense of individuality alienates him from his peers and causes him to see them as machine parts instead of human beings. And it is possible to apply at least part of that reading to what happens to Khan here, as his blind hatred for Kirk and desire for vengeance drives away his loyal crew (as symbolized by that one random guy who says a few lines and then dies pointlessly) and is ultimately his downfall.

The thing is, doing that is, to be very charitable, putting far more thought into the motif then the people writing this movie did, who very obviously did *not* intend to write a polemic against capitalism but rather wanted to reference Moby-Dick because it's a Big Important Western Literary Thing that makes them look highbrow and intellectual. It would certainly redeem a lot about Khan as a character to have him fill the role James feels Ahab plays in the original, but I simply don't see any evidence this story in particular is anything other than a hollow recitation of Moby-Dick done simply because Moby-Dick was a naval epic and Star Trek is the Space Navy again now. Add to that the use of “Amazing Grace” at Spock's funeral (unfortunately, Meyer and his team did not have the benefit of time travel and were thus unaware that Spock was fond of that poem, as we learned in “Come What May”), Kirk constantly flashing A Tale of Two Cities as if it's cash and he's a high roller at a dance club, not to mention *Genesis* itself, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan becomes a truly insufferable paean to Great White Western Culture as filtered through the lens of a New York State Regents Exam.

The other thing about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is that is looks astonishingly cheap. I don't just mean it looks like it had a smaller budget than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which it did and is understandable because that movie's budget was obscene and ridiculous and it still looked like crap when it wasn't doing things with V'Ger. I mean this movie doesn't actually even look like a proper Hollywood blockbuster, which is...puzzling, to put it mildly, considering this was Paramount's marquee release in 1982 and meant to compete with The Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner. There's simply no excuse for the overabundance of stock footage here: I don't care if your budget was slashed, you make a movie of this scale and get Industrial Light and Magic to do the effects and you can't get a single new shot of the Enterprise model until three quarters of the way in? Especially when you've somehow managed to make the drydock scenes look *even worse* than they did in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

(And really, I don't mean “admirably and promisingly amateurish” or “pleasingly theatrical”, I mean “cheap”. All of the interior starship scenes are shot on what are visibly the exact same sets with no effort made to distinguish them, which is distracting and sad, and that William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán never actually get to act off one another because Khan only appears in what are obviously pre-recorded segments is absolutely ridiculous and basically the antithesis of theatre.)

It's not that I expect or want Star Trek to look like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I do expect it to actually *try* with whatever resources it has. You don't have to have a ludicrous budget to look imaginative and inspiring: Doctor Who can do it. Raumpatrouille Orion is a bloody masterclass at it. Once we get further into the 1980s, I'll start talking about a show that absolutely revolutionized doing world-class science fiction on an Ed Wood budget. Even the Original Series *itself* wasn't terrible at this: It didn't start to look cash-starved until invisible one-way exploding spaceships started showing up and we began to do episodes about empty Enterprise stage sets. This though, looks and feels like every bit of the drab, grey and uninspired military affair it is.

The big problem is that this is simply not good enough for a marquee Hollywood blockbuster, which by its very nature needs to have an element of spectacle about it. But this brings us to an interesting revelation: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan isn't actually a marquee Hollywood blockbuster in spirit, even if in practice it was supposed to be: It's a B-movie. Granted, just about nobody involved is treating it as anything *other* than a B-movie (just look at the acting, especially in the big emotional moments, in particular William Shatner and DeForest Kelley), but the fact is that's what this is. And this is interesting, because it *also* wants to be a deathly serious war epic and a story about aging. And this genre and that narrative structure have never really overlapped before. But while it has the trappings of a B-movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan lacks the art house enthusiasm of something like Eraserhead, the niche appeal of a horror movie or the the campy escapist fun of any of the cult classics. It is, somewhat tragically, a B-movie that doesn't realise it's a B-movie.

Yeah, OK, I'll briefly talk about Spock's death.

I mean, there's not a whole lot to say about it, aside from the acknowledged clever double feint of having him die in the simulation early on to cover up for the fact the initial draft of the story leaked. Leonard Nimoy wanted to retire from Star Trek again, which is something of a hobby of his, and wouldn't do the movie unless Spock was killed off. So he was. It was, understandably, a big emotional moment for fandom and one of the most memorable images from the franchise's history. No need to go over that again. A few things that stick out to me about this scene that I don't think are commented on a lot: One, everything leading up to the actual death scene is completely laughable and ridiculous: Spock just gets up, as if he got a cue from off camera and then heads down to the irradiated engineering deck as if to say “Welp. Guess it's time to die now”, where he proceeds to just wreck all of the shit in sight with no particular method or purpose while DeForest Kelley and James Doohan try their absolute hardest to give the single most hilarious, overblown and impossible-to-take-seriously tragic monologue in history.

The other thing about this scene though, is that it's an absolute perfect microcosm for this movie's ambition...and its shortcomings. Because killing off Spock happens to be incredibly symbolic, considering he is the most iconic aspect of the Original Series story and arguably the character who symbolizes it the best, both diegetically and extradiegetically. Those comparisons I made to “In Thy Image” above? Those musings about how this could have laid the groundwork for a new Star Trek? That was precisely the point. Not only was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan meant to be the “new” Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it was also meant to be the *last* Star Trek Motion Picture. Those aging motifs may have the relative subtlety of your average blunderbuss, but Meyer put them in for a reason: This is very clearly and explicitly an attempt to end Star Trek as a mass market Soda Pop Art franchise. In many ways we're back in the territory of Star Trek: The New Voyages: The new status quo is established with Saavik, The New Spock (and really, The New Kirk as well), ready to take charge of a new generation of Star Trek, which is to be left in the capable hands of the fans to take wherever they want her to go.

But...

How many times has Star Trek tried to kill itself off by now? Like, five or six, by my count already? How do you think that was going to take? There's no way Paramount was going to let its primary cash cow disappear, and so we get a stonking great sequel hook where Spock's casket lands on the Genesis planet and every single bloody character makes unbelievably unsubtle comments about “new life”. Yeah, no, contrary to popular belief it's not the next movie that zombifies the Star Trek film franchise, it's this one. Even *without* knowing the next movie is called Star Trek III: The Search for Spock its impossible *not* to assume a sequel is going to be imminent looking at the last shots of this movie. It's as obvious as anything else this movie does, and Harve Bennett, who wrote the initial draft of the script, is on record saying Paramount immediately contracted him to write Star Trek III before this film was even released. The studio simply couldn't leave it alone, so Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ends up feeling utterly pointless on top of everything else that's unsatisfying about it.

Is this a better movie than Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Well, I suppose so, simply by virtue of it having things like actual scripted dialogue instead of making the actors recite flight training manuals and pacing that resembles something human beings might film rather than primeval stone-giants. And, much of the acting is well done and suitable for the setting: Special props must go to Kirstie Alley and Bibi Besch, both of whom give absolute first-rate performances and the latter of whom perfectly embodies what James T. Kirk's wife would be-Someone every bit as commanding and driven as he is. But, when the smoke clears and Khan gets his final Epic Villain Monologue, the fact Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a B-movie that doesn't want to admit it's a B-movie and that Trekkers actually think this is an erudite and sophisticated cinematic masterpiece say it all for me. This movie is every bit as self-absorbed and pretentiously middlebrow as its predecessor, it just doesn't *look* like it anymore.

In many ways, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan really is the definitive Star Trek movie: It's a solidly executed translation of the blunt, ham-fisted moralizing and blatant militarism that characterized the early Original Series to film. Perhaps that's why this movie is as beloved as it is. And why I can't stand it.

“It's only human”: In Thy Image (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)

We are urgently requesting backup and further advice...Intel on the ground indicates that this timeline has been effectively secured by our forces for the moment, though installing a permanent presence here seems unlikely...While they've been mostly keeping quiet for the moment, there's no doubt The Empire will eventually take notice of what we're doing here and strike back with a vengeance, and skirmishes with the other renegade factions are a constant problem...We followed your instructions and The Prototype codename “VOYAGER” is complete and ready for a shakedown cruise, though we are concerned as to its structural stability and overall viability and worry it may not yet be capable of fulfilling The Purpose for which it was designed, and that activating it will alert The Empire as to our whereabouts...Please inform as to further action ASAP...

At some point it became inevitable.

While a tenaciously niche property throughout the 1970s, Star Trek gave no indication of ever going away, especially once new generations of fans started to get introduced to it. It had a uniquely built-in self-regenerating audience, and one that was big enough to eventually attract the attention of the higher-ups. It was never a question of if Star Trek would come back, but how and when. The answer to all of those questions eventually came in 1977, when Paramount announced plans to enter the television market with their own network, and a new Star Trek series as its flagship programme. The series, chronicling a second five-year mission of the newly-refitted USS Enterprise under the command of Admiral James T. Kirk, eventually got the name Star Trek Phase II and premiered the following year.

Star Trek Phase II was not the first idea Paramount had for ways to revive the franchise: Originally, there were plans for a British-produced feature film called Star Trek: Planet of the Titans, to be handled by a pre-Star Wars Ralph McQuarrie. This film was in development throughout 1976 and 1977, but was eventually abandoned in favour of doing this show instead (and, presumably, due to McQuarrie's commitments to the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg camp). It was an interesting story, involving heavily redesigned Enterprise following the original five-year mission involved in a territorial dispute with the Klingons over a planet rumoured to be home to a mythical race of cosmic Titans, who apparently were very influential in the history of life in the galaxy. After a brief dust-up involving a black hole and time travel, the Enterprise finds itself back in time and orbiting prehistoric Earth, where the crew soon discover that they are in fact the mythical Titans.

But returning to Star Trek Phase II, the series premier, “In Thy Image”, was a real event: Unlike the Original Series, which sort of just appeared out of nowhere, Star Trek Phase II was hyped up with a big PR machine and took off with a massive two-hour pilot movie. With much of the original creative team returning, as well as the addition of talented and professional new team members like Andy Probert and Robert Wise, who will go on to leave their own marks on the history of the franchise, this is as good an introduction to the new Star Trek as we could have hoped for, showing genuine maturation and development of themes we've seen explored before, and that most Star Trek of promises to continue growing and learning along the way. In fact, “In Thy Image” is basically about this, at least on one textual level.

But wait, we can't just leap into this like it's a run-of-the-mill Star Trek story. This is a series premier, a proper one, which means we need to take some time to examine the show's setting, cast of characters and status quo. The first obvious change is, of course, the completely redesigned Enterprise: The designs of Matt Jeffries, Andy Probert and Mike Minor give both the ship's interior and exterior a unique look, one that both feels like an evolution of specific design themes from the Original Series and distinctly 1970s, though early 1970s (which makes it also feel curiously outdated). This philosophy extends to the rest of the look of the show, which also evokes a crisp and distinctive style of Golden Age science fiction iconography (especially, and perhaps appropriately, 2001: A Space Odyssey).

The characters too have gotten a noticeable upgrade, and across the board its for the better. Everyone's been promoted, and each person feels older, wiser and more worldy then they did on the Original Series. This is best embodied in Admiral Kirk, a seasoned veteran space traveller who is consciously depicted differently than the brash hothead Kirk at least had the reputation of being on the Original Series. Some characters, like newly-minted Doctor Chapel, feel completely different: In both the writing and Majel Barret's performance I see shades of Lwaxana Troi to come: An affable, gregarious, outgoing chatterbox who's about 180 degrees from any previous depiction of the character and immediately likable (she even gets to carve out a sizable role in the actual plot, which leads me to believe this was the beginning of Gene Roddenberry and his team really recognising Barrett's strongest when you just let her be herself and don't make her actually act). Even Janice Rand is back, serving as Commander Uhura's relief communications officer.

We also have a crop of new characters. The most notable is Vulcan Lieutenant Xon, the new science officer, and Spock's replacement. It's hard to read the loss of Spock as anything less than a tremendous blow to Star Trek Phase II, given how absolutely central he was to both the Original Series and the Animated Series. But, Leonard Nimoy didn't want to commit to another Star Trek show, still stinging from how wholly and completely he'd been typecast in the role he played for three years. So, we get a new Vulcan, and, while he's not Spock, he's an engaging and interesting character in his own right. Unlike Spock, Xon is overtly interested in exploring and understanding human emotion, and his attempts to become more human define much of his character arc on the show. He's also a fresh-face youngster, always eager to please and endlessly enthusiastic about throwing himself into his work, to the point he places doing his job, far, far and away above his own personal well-being. And, the energetic David Gautreaux conveys all of this admirably.

Without Spock present, though, this also means that Kirk and McCoy get to have a much closer relationship in this show than they did in either of the two previous ones. Most of the big character moments in “In Thy Image” are between Kirk and McCoy, and the episode is great at conveying that these are two very old friends who know each other inside and out and who are capable of stepping in to make decisions on each other's behalf they wouldn't necessarily make on their own. Two scenes in particular that stick out in my mind are when Kirk approaches McCoy in the wilds of San Francisco and after V'Ger starts towing the Enterprise to Earth: In the former, McCoy expresses ambivalence about serving in Starfleet as Kirk begins to reminisce about the five-year mission, which also doubles as a bang-on critique of the Original Series patently ridiculous and obscene body count:

“What I remember, Jim...are the friends who couldn't be put back together. For five years...so many of them.”

Kirk tries to get McCoy to sign back on for the new Enterprise's crew, while McCoy straight-up asks why he's not back in the captain's chair. It's a great moment that shows off these characters' dedication, loyalty and restlessness. In the latter scene, meanwhile, McCoy does his usual making sure Kirk gets some rest in the middle of a tense situation, but what's great here is that it comes right after a scene where Kirk gives a similar speech to Xon, and another where Kirk requested McCoy and Chapel keep a close eye on them. Not only is it Star Trek camaraderie at its finest (and probably a nod at how their relationship was supposed to work all along before Spock came around) and a decisive argument against the tired “triumvirate” and id/ego/superego reading of the Original Series, it's also a great bit of just basic structural continuity that goes a long way towards proving this show has finally grown up a bit.

Then there's Will Decker, Kirk's new first officer, and Lieutenant Ilia, the new navigator. The addition of Decker is the aspect of Star Trek Phase II that makes it the most evident a substantial amount of time has passed: He's clearly going to be the character who filled Kirk's earlier role, the commanding and virile lead man (although this episode at least seems a bit uncertain about this), and there's a bit of a generation gap situation between him and Kirk, though Kirk obviously considers him a friend and a reliable ally. Decker has something of a complicated history, son of the infamous Matt Decker and still haunted by his father's actions in “The Doomsday Machine”, Will is bound and determined to prove himself, and he was almost given his own command before Kirk requested him as his XO for the Enterprise's emergency first mission (for which Will is a bit resentful). Will has a history with Ilia, a member of a mysterious species called the Deltans, renowned for their almost psychic empathic abilities and love of sex and sensuality (so much so that they have to take an oath of celibacy before working with non-Deltans). Will and Ilia were romantically involved at some point in the past, but have since broken up, and moving beyond this forms the basis of their character arcs on the show.

(I also have to give major props to Persis Khambata, who plays Ilia: Deltans are supposedly hairless, and, while she was offered a bald cap, she instead opted to get into character by shaving her entire body. That's dedication, girlfriend.)

Another milestone “In Thy Image” gives Star Trek is the first real textual confirmation of the universe's express utopianism. Although previous Star Trek hinted at this and it was largely assumed to be the case by fandom, “In Thy Image” makes it very overt that the world it takes place in is very much an idealistic one more peaceful and prosperous than the one we live in today. This is most evident in the scene where Kirk goes to meet McCoy, which doubles as the first time we actually get to see Earth in Star Trek. And it's a profoundly weird scene: San Francisco is a mishmash hybrid of futuristic architecture and untamed natural wilderness that seem to organically grow around each other, such that the park we see McCoy in features happy children mingling with actual wild animals, and in particular cheetahs, who just loiter around and play with the kids. The implication, interestingly enough, is that material social progress might eventually get us to a point where there's no tangible distinction between humans and nature, and that nature itself recognises this. It's at once Star Trek for the environmental age but at the same time not: This is a genuinely bizarre and unprecedented vision of the future and conception of utopia and I don't think I've seen it anywhere else, yet alone in any other Star Trek.

To me though this is also very indicative of how indebted the new creative team is to fandom, and how much they really, truly did listen to them throughout the 1970s. That utopianism and idealism the fans saw in Star Trek and wrote about in droves was actually written back into the next bit of Star Trek Soda Pop Art to be produced: Weird as it is, this is idealistic on every level, and the show goes out of its way to make this clear at every opportunity. What this tells me is that, one again, Star Trek was never explicitly utopian from the beginning: If you actually watch the Original Series, it becomes pretty clear what it was originally supposed to be: Roddenberry's Fables. But, because of the diverse casting and a few memorable moments, fans read a wonderful, captivating, engrossing utopian dream onto it, and that was so infectious that when Star Trek came back to television it made sure to make this a central theme. Even so though, the universe Star Trek Phase II presents, while idealistic, is not a flawless one. It's still imperfect and is still growing and learning, and this is in fact the entire message of “In Thy Image”.

It may seem unusual to get this far into an analysis without talking about what “In Thy Image” is actually about, but really, I haven't done: Given its status as a series premier, by definition a huge swath of the story is going to be taken up introducing everything. And this extends to the rest of the story as well. First of all, while the script was written by Harold Livingston, the original story treatment was actually by Alan Dean Foster. Knowing this, in hindsight, it does make the wonderfully surreal scene in San Francisco make more sense. However, it is also worth pointing out that the experience of “In Thy Image” is also what convinced Foster to abandon writing for Hollywood altogether and focus on his novel work, which is unfortunate (though sadly prescient: Thus begins a long, not-so-proud tradition of Star Trek getting such a horrible reputation for frustrating writers it burns every bridge it ever had the potential of having).

Even so, the script he and Livingston came up with is just terrific: Years after the end of the five-year mission, Admiral Kirk is called upon to once again take command of the retrofitted USS Enterprise, the most advanced vessel in the fleet, and the one that happens to be closest in position to investigate a mysterious force that has destroyed an entire Klingon armada and is making its way to Earth. Rekindling relationships with old friends and making some new ones, Kirk and the new crew of the Enterprise try to make peaceful contact with the alien life force before it wipes out the entire Federation. Engaging the force at the end of the solar system, it's soon revealed that it's a gigantic sentient starship that calls itself V'Ger, thinks the Enterprise is alive as well and is gravely concerned about the 400 carbon-based “parasites” that “infest: its body. To make matters worse, after scanning the ship's records (which the Enterprise computer helpfully provided for it) V'Ger determines that a similar infestation is plaguing The Holy Home of the Creator, that is Earth, and, as its chosen champion, is destined to cure its ancestral home.

Eventually it's revealed that V'Ger is actually Voyager 18, one of the last space probes sent out be NASA. It was thought lost, but actually fell through a black hole and wound up on a planet of machine-people, where a sharing of minds took place and the newly emerged V'Ger went on a journey to find its origin. Now right away this is probably ringing some bells for my ever-astute readers: This is pretty much the same plot as “The Changeling”, a second season episode of the Original Series about a space probe sent out by 20th century space agencies that disappeared, had an encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence and then went on a journey to find its origin. Similarly, the space probe, in this case known as Nomad, was deeply concerned about imperfect carbon-based lifeforms and, because its tapes had been scrambled, felt it was its duty to cleanse the universe of all imperfections.

Back when I talked about “The Changeling”, I mentioned the fundamental problem with this story was twofold: Firstly, this is a very Pop Christian kind of story because it's about a journey to essentially find God (which is clearly meant to be one specific being or thing), and secondly, related to this, it relies on a Western conception of metaphysics because it presupposes a singular objective Truth. “In Thy Image”, however, plays with this concept a bit, and it's a far more enjoyable and multi-faceted story than “The Changeling” because of it. For one thing V'Ger, unlike Nomad, isn't looking for perfection, it just can't understand life that isn't machine-based. This means V'Ger is a mirror for the ignorance and self-centredness of humans (and, actually, the narrow-mindedness of the early Federation as seen in Original Series episodes like “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark”-Tellingly, Kirk and McCoy reference the Horta here) and their unwillingness to broaden their horizons to other worldviews and ways of living, which makes it a far more effective metaphor for humanity.

That said there is a scene near the climax where Kirk, speaking to V'Ger's representative (a probe that's temporarily assumed the form of Ilia) tries to convince it of the virtue of imperfection and human foibles, V'Ger not being able to understand why humans would want to settle for such things and about ready to vaporize the Earth. Kirk's point being, of course, that humans pride themselves on being able to learn from their mistakes and are always growing and trying to better themselves. What's great about this scene though is that it's in the same park where Kirk met McCoy at the beginning of the episode: As idyllic as Earth is it's still not perfect because, in truth, it can't be. Eventually, Ilia-Probe gets V'Ger to call off its attack by lying to it, a human imperfection she learned the situational value of. The point being on the one hand another affirmation of the Star Trek lesson to never stop growing and learning, but also what can be gained when two people talk to each other and share perspectives.

But the other needed twist on this story “In Thy Image” provides is how it conceives of truth and the divine. One of my favourite moments comes where Kirk gets indignant at V'Ger's insistent use of the phrase “The Holy Home of the Creator”. This irritates Kirk because, according to him, there can be no one “Home” of a singular “Creator”: The point of origin of not just V'Ger, but humans, and every other form of life in the universe, is not one place but everywhere at once. The entire Cosmos. We are all stardust. “In Thy Image” is not quite Star Trek's definitive statement on the divine, nor even of the Original Series story, but it's a damn good one, a clear step forward for the franchise and the moment where the philosophy of Star Trek really starts to crystallize for the first time. The structure of the story may retain some of the Pop Christianity of “The Changeling”, but it's shunted all of that onto V'Ger's role and is trying very hard to come up with an alternative. It doesn't have one just yet, or at least hasn't expounded on it, but the fact it's working hard to get there is one more sign that Star Trek is growing and learning.

With all of that in mind, it's hard for me to claim that “In Thy Image” isn't simply one of the single best pieces of Star Trek we've yet seen. It's without question one of the best episodes yet made: Aside from the engaging and mature philosophy, a breath of fresh air from the two-fisted moralizing of the past, it's also a structural song, and I attribute all of that to Livingston and Foster's influence. The Original Series had an annoyingly reoccurring problem with pacing, and a *ton* of the episodes on that show felt badly, badly padded; stretching really basic, pulp material far beyond the point anyone should have tried to stretch it. But “In Thy Image” doesn't have any of those problems: Every single moment feels worthwhile and important, and every moment comes back in some form or another later on, tying the whole story up into a neat and tidy bundle. Furthermore, any worries that the creative team might feel tempted to get self-indulgent with a feature-length story are quickly put to rest as “In Thy Image” moves along at a crisp, jaunty pace. It's always provocative, always engaging, and always a pleasure to follow.

...But that said, there are a few problems with it. For one thing, as much time and care as it takes to introduce the new characters and the new setting, it still tends to fall back on focusing on Kirk, McCoy and Xon pretty heavily. At least this episode also elevates Chapel and Will Decker to that league, which is nice, and Chekov, Sulu and Uhura each get their moments to shine, which is also very much appreciated. But other characters aren't so lucky: Janice Rand is basically an extra, which is annoying, but the real problem is Ilia. She's supposed to be a major new character, and the script does basically nothing with her. She gets to sex up Sulu for a laugh, but that's the extent of her role in this episode as she's quickly whisked away by V'Ger due to her empathic abilities (not the last time Ilia would be used as a vehicle for an alien to try and explore and understand humanity). Persis Khambata gets a meaty role as she comes back as “Tasha”, one of V'Ger's probes who temporarily takes on Ilia's form and sort of becomes its spokesperson, but it still seems odd to not have her play the role she was actually hired to play for the majority of the episode she was introduced in. For all of the feminist strides Star Trek has made over the years, we're still seeing women used primarily as plot devices, so I guess we've still got a ways to go.

Then there are the special effects. Which, OK, hate complaining about effects, this is the most money Star Trek has *ever* had and the overwhelming majority of this episode looks *gorgeous* to be sure. However...this is still television in 1978, and it's painfully obvious there were corners cut in places one would perhaps like corners to not be cut in. One thing that bothered me was the reuse of a lot of costumes from the Original Series, which jar pretty horribly with the look-and-feel of the rest of the show. But the biggest VFX fail for sure has to be V'Ger itself: If I were to be charitable, I'd say it looks like an update of the Planet Killer from “The Doomsday Machine”, which would be altogether fitting given the presence of Will Decker, but if I'm being honest...It looks like a dunce cap. And don't get me going on the CSO composite shots with V'Ger and the Enterprise: The script says our ship looks like a golf ball against the incomprehensible vastness of V'Ger and that's exactly what it looks like. There's no getting around the fact that when you're trying to convey a sense of cosmic awe and wonder, golf balls and dunce caps are not quite the best way to go about doing that.

But, even in spite of its quirks and imperfections, I'm still going to call “In Thy Image” one of my absolute favourite Star Trek episodes to date. It's conclusive proof that not only is Star Trek back, it's grown to become something bigger and better than what it used to be. And, in doing so, it's reaffirmed its commitment to neverending personal growth on its neverending journey through the stars. After all, isn't that the whole point of this episode? That humans can better themselves and shouldn't settle for a simulacrum of perfection, as that way lies complacency and a toxic stasis? The least I can do is take the lessons of this episode and apply them to “In Thy Image” itself. All art ultimately comes from our own experiences and positionalities, and no matter how hard some try, that can never be distilled out of the finished product. If that's the image Star Trek reflects for us now, it's hard not to feel heartened by it.

UPGRADE OR DIE. PREPARE TO BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.


The first thing we should square away is that of all the possible ways for Star Trek to come back, this was by no means the inevitable one, or even, really, one that would be seen as in any way logical or reasonable.

For ten years, it seemed obvious that whatever form Star Trek would return in, it would always remain something particularly niche. As recently as 1977 we had the entire cast and Gene Roddenberry himself positing that, for the foreseeable future at least, fanfiction was the future of Star Trek. Even when we looked at things like The Star Fleet Technical Manual and Star Fleet Battles, those were still, ultimately, products of fan love and ingenuity. Comics and tie-in books? Bantam's, and later Pocket's, Star Trek line was full of wild experiments and world building and Doug Drexler was writing for Gold Key. All by fans, for fans.

In other words, it would be absolutely unthinkable for anyone even a year or two prior to 1979 that Star Trek's actual return to the world of Soda Pop Art would be in the form of a massive, sprawling, self-consciously epic “Motion Picture Extravaganza”. What everyone would have expected would be something like a revived Star Trek TV series with a comparatively larger budget and studio support airing on a niche timeframe either on a niche network or even direct to syndication, especially considering Paramount had announced precisely that exactly two years ago. What eventually became Star Trek: The Motion Picture began life as a special two-hour pilot movie, “In Thy Image” for a proposed new Star Trek TV show entitled Star Trek Phase II, which would have premiered in 1978 as the flagship show of a new Paramount-owned network.

The only reason we have this movie, and by association the film series it spawns, instead of the should-have-been third Star Trek TV show is because Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind happened and Paramount suddenly thought they should be competing with them. Now, there are a great deal many and varied reasons why Star Trek cannot compete with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not the least of which is that none of the three are remotely comparable works aside from the fact they can all be loosely called science fiction, but that's a discussion for another time and place. The bottom line is that the move to scrap Star Trek Phase II and rewrite “In Thy Image” to be a feature film was a decisive one, and a damning one, and it's impossible to properly talk about one without also talking about the other.

Let's not beat around the bush here. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a deeply flawed and problematic film. It's nowhere near as bad as Star Trek fans say it is (which is somewhere in the vicinity of “The Worst Movie Ever Made”): It has a great deal of captivating moments and paves the way for a lot of really good Star Trek to come. But it doesn't really work either, and the reason for this is entirely because it's a television episode (and not just any episode, but a pilot) artificially stretched to become a movie (and not just any movie, but a barnstorming cinematic epic) and also because Gene Roddenberry was the guy who did the stretching. This is without question the reason this film is frequently accused of having the pacing of glacial melt, aside from the fact that it does.

But this is worth parsing out, because while this criticism is perfectly valid and likely the biggest issue with this film, the argument is almost always made completely the wrong way; citing things as problems that aren't actually problems and flat-out ignoring cripplingly serious flaws. In this regard, my biggest gripe with those who denounce this movie on the basis of its pacing is their claim that the various VFX shots (in particular the V'Ger Cloud stuff and the scene where Scotty takes Admiral Kirk on a tour around the exterior of the refit Enterprise) linger forever and drag the film out intolerably. First of all, in the context of V'Ger I just have to flat-out disagree: Those special effects are incredible and are without question some of the most evocative and mesmerizing science fiction images ever conceived, let alone put to film, bar none, and I'll debate anyone on that. The film was right to linger on those shots, because that's precisely the sort of imagery you should linger on.

I used to be a huge fan of this movie: Before rewatching it for this project, I would have called it one of the three or four best Star Trek movies (admittedly not a title with a ton of competition or prestige). Seeing it again with a new perspective, I found it to be the *definition* of “slow motion train wreck”, but even still V'Ger was the *only* thing from it that was anywhere remotely near as powerful and imaginative as I remembered. Seriously, I could do an entire essay just on how V'Ger looks and what that means to me.

As for the Enterprise scene, bear in mind this was the first new footage of the ship people had seen in a decade, and it was on a movie screen and completely redesigned by Matt Jeffries and Andy Probert to look slick and cool: This is Star Trek's moment of triumph, and it's allowed to indulge itself. The problem is that the actual effects shots used in filming that scene are nowhere near as good as they need to be to justify that indulgence. We've got this lovely new model and, while it's clear the workbee, drydock and starbase models are equally as intricately designed and we do get more of a sense for the presence of the greater Star Trek universe, this is all conveyed...through a crappy 1970s CSO job. It *doesn't* look as good as Star Wars, it *doesn't* look as good as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (though it's clear Roddenberry and his team are painfully trying to ape both) and it doesn't even look as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was eleven years old by this point.

I'm not one to pull the eye candy card, but I think the fact the VFX comes up a bit short here actually proves to be a massive problem for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and here's why: See, Roddenberry isn't just envisioning this as a Star Trek movie, he's very clearly envisioning it as a cinematic epic. Roddenberry's not only trying to compete with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or even with 2001: A Space Odyssey (by which “compete” of course means “try very hard to show that we can do everything bigger, better, more spectacular and more extravagant than everybody else”), he's genuinely trying to make a case that Star Trek: The Motion Picture deserves to stand alongside Cleopatra, The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. He even went so far as to pluck Douglas Turnbull (who worked on 2001) to be the VFX supervisor (which is probably why the V'Ger stuff looks as good as it does), tapped Hollywood veteran Robert Wise to direct and got Paramount to host the biggest, most lavish press conference in their history to that point to announce the project. Gene Roddenberry actually thinks he's Cecil B. DeMille.

And he absolutely isn't. Just like the VFX shots of the Enterprise in drydock, Roddenberry isn't remotely as up to the pale as he thinks he is, because the story is just as over-stretched as the effects are. What I find so completely baffling is that Roddenberry somehow took a tight, perfectly functional script and for some inexplicable reason decided to thin it out before adapting it into a movie! I've read the original script for “In Thy Image” and it was a terrific piece of work. In fact, I'd say with a few minor tweaks and revisions it could have been filmed as-is and would have been one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever made. Roddenberry, however, takes a hack saw to it and his usual deft hand ends up introducing a whole new raft of problems. This is another reason Star Trek: The Motion Picture moves along at the speed of continental drift: The vast majority of the runtime is actually taken up not by lingering special effects shots, but with military procedure.

Without question the most aggravating and unwatchable moments in this film for me came when Roddenberry has the crew spend agonizing minutes reciting bits of starship procedural lingo at each other, making reports from their stations and waxing profusely on Starfleet rules and regulations. It's the exact same shit that drags down all of Roddenberry's other scripts, from “The Cage” to “The Savage Curtain” and he's clearly learned nothing in over a decade. It's not even that the movie has too much exposition, another common complaint. Actually, the problem is the exact opposite: There is no exposition! The original script for “In Thy Image” had a lot of really well done, really *relevant* scenes introducing the new setting, the new status quo and showing us all the important moments that explain who all the characters are and the relationships they have with each other. Star Trek: The Motion Picture has precisely none of this, Roddenberry deciding it best to take all of it out and replace it with more of his Little Boy Soldiers military pornography.

It's the characters who get shafted the most, obviously, to the point where entire motivations were changed without any real rhyme or reason. Admiral Kirk gets it the worst: In “In Thy Image”, Kirk is reluctant to take command of the Enterprise again considering himself to be too old and at too much of a different point in life. He actually has to be pushed into taking action by McCoy, who reminds him that this is where his heart truly lies, and Admiral Nogura (who is an actual character in this version, as opposed to merely being mentioned occasionally in passing, like he is in the movie) who points out Kirk is the best person for the job, Also, Kirk *personally requests* Will Decker as his XO, who was about to take command of an entirely different and unrelated ship because he valued his judgment and needed someone younger and sharper around. In the movie, meanwhile, Kirk becomes a total asshole, selfishly muscling his way into command, alienating McCoy and Decker for no real reason and the story becomes generic burden-of-command, married-to-the-ship drivel.

(There's also a great scene in Kirk's quarters in the original script where he explains to Decker, McCoy and Chapel that his repressed desire for the Enterprise might cloud his judgment, while Decker also confesses his bitterness at losing command might do the same, and they both ask the doctors to keep an eye on them: It's a great, idealistic scene where two people talk about their feelings, and it got cut right out, replaced with a far more antagonistic and confrontational one. Actually, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is far less utopian than “In Thy Image” across the board, yet another reminder that what Star Trek means to the professionals and what it means to the fans are two very different things.)

The one thing I will give this movie is that it does a good job fleshing out the relationship between Will Decker and Ilia, which “In Thy Image” never quite managed to do (though the later Star Trek Phase II scripts do explore their relationship, it really should have been introduced in the pilot. It's one of the minor tweaks and revisions I would have made). The film also has the good sense to have Decker be the one interacting with the Ilia-Probe instead of Kirk, though ultimately this is all pointless because Decker and Ilia ascend to a higher plane of existence at the end of the movie, just as we always knew they were going to. But apart from this, the movie just doesn't seem to care about them: There's no mention of Ilia's Deltan heritage and what that means (which is the whole reason V'Ger picked her, because she was empathic) and nothing about Decker's backstory and personal demons. As the two legacy characters introduced for the abandoned TV show, of course they have to be the ones to snuff it, so it becomes impossible to actually get invested in anything they do. Originally intended to be major characters in Star Trek Phase II, Star Trek: The Motion Picture turns Decker and Ilia into glorified redshirts, which makes their story, much like most of this film, feel like a complete waste of time.

There's also an entire character who doesn't make the cut at all, science officer Xon (though his actor, David Gautreaux, has a minor role in the movie), because Paramount rightly decided they couldn't have a Star Trek movie without Spock. Writing him in, however, required another massive change to the original script, and this had the side effect of messing up the story's primary theme. Originally, the point of V'Ger was that it was incapable of comprehending a form of life that wasn't like itself, making it a kind of mirror of the Federation. The plot was resolved by V'Ger and the “Carbon Units” learning to communicate and coming to understand how similar they were. Now though, V'Ger ends up a massively overblown metaphor for the standard Spock story about learning how both logic (here defined as “quantitative information”) and emotions (here defined as “sensuality”) are necessary to live a fulfilling life. And while that's not terrible, it feels less effective, especially since D.C. Fontana did this story twice already and her combined efforts are a fraction of the length of Star Trek: The Motion Picture's runtime.

But the biggest conceptual problem with Star Trek: The Motion Picture's V'Ger is the end resolution, where Spock describes it as a “child” and encourages Kirk to “treat it as such”. This opens up a *huge* swath of worrying implications and subtexts it flat out submarines any remaining vestigial potential effectiveness this movie had. Back when I discussed “Bem” for the Animated Series I took issue at that script's conception of God as a benevolent, divine authority beyond reproach, a description and phrase which longtime readers will probably figure would get under my skin a bit. So now, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we have a Jobian, Pop Christian concept of godhood once again, and now we've gone an extra alarming step and attributed this perspective to Kirk and Spock. Forget all those criticisms Star Trek: The Next Generation gets about being holier-than-thou and entitled, this has me the most concerned: After all, humanity is explicitly V'Ger's God, so this movie is tacitly endorsing the selfsame benevolent dictator perspective that will most assuredly run Star Trek aground faster and more catastrophically than anything else. But this is worse than even "Space Seed", because now Star Trek isn't just claiming to be your augmented, superior philosopher king, it's claiming to be your patrician GOD.

(The implication is likely supposed to be that humans too are like children, as we're in some sense still meant to be seen as comparable to V'Ger, but that meaning is absolutely not conveyed anywhere close to how explicitly it would have needed to be to actually work.)

The result is all of this is that we're right back at the presumptuousness and hubris that Gene Roddenberry burdened Star Trek with from the beginning. Though there have been many examples, I can't think of a more perfect embodiment of this problem than this movie. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an overstuffed, overwrought, pretentious, middlebrow slog that's demonstrative of nothing else except Star Trek enthusiastically and ineffectually trying to punch above its class. And it kills me, because there are a lot of things to recommend here: Robert Wise's work on this film gets a bad rap, but it's actually pretty good: His feel for actor placement, blocking and visual symbolism is pitch-perfect. It gives Star Trek a cinematic scope that it usually doesn't have and shouldn't have, but is appropriate here. The scenes with V'Ger are nothing short of landmark science fiction, and there's a great story buried underneath all of that just waiting to be told. But it's just not enough in the end. When you aim that big and miss, you're only gonna crash and burn big too.

Shakedown trials to commence *immediately* on The Prototype codename “VOYAGER”. Proceed with swiftness, as the enemy grows ever stronger and wiser.