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The Appropriate Tune: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", by Leonard Nimoy
Talk about a legacy, huh? When I covered Star Trek: The Motion Picture all the way back in Marathon ‘15, that I would even do the other films was still a vague concept in my mind. You never really know what your situation is going to be in the future after all, and it’s certainly possible that in the intervening time between Octobers I could have lost interest in Star Trek, or found some other film to fill that spot on the card, or just covered them in a separate review altogether, or just fucking died and never got to watch them. But no, every year the Marathon has come and gone, and every year for the past five years we have borne witness to the adventures of Captain Kirk and the USS Enterprise, for better or for worse (looking at you Star Trek V). Now, after three seasons, an animated series, a couple albums and a shipload of homoerotic fanfiction, we’ve reached the end of the road. This is the end, my beautiful friends, the end.
Released in 1991, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country shows it’s not kidding right out of the gate by putting Nicholas Meyer in the director’s chair, who had previously brought great success to the franchise through Wrath of Kahn (Marathon buffs will also known him from Time After Time). With a tip of the hat to the then-recently departed Gene Roddenberry at the start, we join the USS Excelsior, where Captain Sulu is enjoying his ‘three days away from retirement’ status. Those good vibes are soon interrupted by the Excelsior being rocked by an energy wave, which as it turns out was the Klingon moon Praxis blowing the fuck up. Praxis was the main power source for the entire Klingon Empire as it turns out, their entire civilization is set to collapse in a couple decades with it gone, so with the sword of Damocles looming above their head they finally sit down to talk. The long conflict between the Klingons and the Federation seems to be coming to an end, but there are some among Starfleet that balk at the thought of diplomacy. Folk like Captain Kirk, who seems to be leaning towards the ‘genocide’ option, and thus the natural choice to break the ice with Chancellor Gorkon (played by David Warner is his second Trek role in a row) of the Klingon High Council before transporting him to a peace conference. When Gorkon is later assassinated and all the evidence points to the Enterprise being responsible, Kirk and McCoy (who was with him at the time) are arrested and put on trial for the crime. Yet if the Enterprise was not responsible for the attack, as the crew seem absolutely certain of, then that begs the question of who did? With the clock ticking ever closer to the start of the peace conference, it’s up to Spock and the rest of the crew to discover the true culprits behind Gorkon’s death, rescue Kirk and McCoy, and save both the Federation and the Klingons from falling back into war. All in a day’s work.
With this film being released the year it was, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between the situation between the Federation and the Klingons with that of the United States and the Soviet Union, with the destruction of Praxis resembling the Chernobyl disaster and Gorkon being a stand-in for Gorbachev. What I appreciate about this story though, especially with the benefit of hindsight, is that Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal do not make the Federation pure-hearted heroes or the Klingons dastardly bad guys, and in fact give the Klingons many reasons not to trust the Federation. Kirk outright advocates for the extinction of the Klingon race near the beginning of the film (I guess a dead son you talked to twice is equal to a couple million dead infants), and most of the crew is casually racist towards Klingons even up to the end of the film. The Klingons bring up how the Federation is a ‘humans-only club’, mirroring that of the U.S. and certain European countries influencing world affairs, and indeed as we see from later Trek series about 90% of the people we see are humans. The Klingons bring up that collaborating with the Federation will destroy their culture, and while they’re still going strong later in the Trek verse, in real life the U.S.-backed Boris Yeltsin regime caused such economic chaos and widespread misery that Russia to this day has never fully recovered, to say nothing of the other former Soviet Republics. Really the worst thing you could say about the Klingons in this film are their penal colonies, a reference to the infamous Soviet gulags, but considering the Federation also has penal colonies it seems like something of a moot point, and we’ve talked on the blog before on the United States’ hypocritical views on prison. You could argue that this goes against Gene Roddenberry’s vision of utopian human society, but I do prefer a Federation that isn’t perfect but is willing to do the right thing and go for peace over the Federation in The Final Frontier, who half-ass a planet-sized vanity project and then leave its citizenry to basically live like animals in a blighted wasteland.
Speaking of The Final Frontier, hoo boy, what a difference a change of directors makes. I’ve heard that William Shatner had requested and was denied an increase of budget for Star Trek V, which was why the special effects by the end weren’t that spectacular, but that doesn’t explain all the shitty attempts at comedy and the fact that a movie titled Star Trek spends most of its time in a desert. Not only does The Undiscovered Country look better all around (the Enterprise looks sleek and futuristic rather than a broken hunk of shit), not only does the story flow better, not only is there a bigger & better cast, not only do the crew actually get some dialogue, but Nicholas Meyer did it all for 6 million dollars less than Shatner. Hell, Wrath of Kahn, often regarded as the best Star Trek film, only cost 12 million! It worked, just as Star Trek VI works, because Meyer tells simple stories in extraordinary settings. Wrath of Kahn was a revenge story combat inspired by submarine combat, Star Trek VI is a mystery story and a political thriller. There are still the trappings of science fiction there, you’re still dealing with outer space and aliens and what have you, but the special effects are more enhancing the story than dominating it. Which has always been a major point of contention in the argument between Star Trek and Star Wars, but I think that sixth Star Star Trek movie has got me more invested in the political drama it was telling than the sixth Star Wars movie ever did, even if it had less pew pew lasers.
Hell, Nicholas Meyer even gets Kirk better than Shatner did during his time in the chair. Kirk in The Final Frontier was in full-on smarm mode for most of the film, and after a while he came across as a jackass. Kirk in The Undiscovered Country not only gets the denouement of his arc that’s been brewing since the second film, dealing with his son’s death and his feelings towards the Klingons, but in general he just feels more in line with the character we know as James T. Kirk. Stuff which doesn’t really play as well in 1991 than it did in 1969, like him beating 7 foot tall aliens and making out with sexy ladies, but since was to be the last ride for the OST crew you can forgive trotting out a bit of nostalgia.
Of the rest of the main cast, Spock is the only other person to come out of this series a different person/Vulcan than when he went in, having mastered the ability to express his emotions without becoming a nutbar like other Vulcans (also Sherlock Holmes is real in the Trek universe and Spock is related to him). McCoy is just McCoy, and the rest of the crew, while more active this time around are just the crew, quirks and all. Again, if the intent is to play on OST nostalgia then it would be fine if we returned to the old characterization, but we never left it! In fact in some ways we’ve gone backwards, as that whole Uhura/Scotty romance thrown around in earlier movies has been completely dropped. It’s nice to see Sulu the captain of his own ship, even though it’s also a convenient excuse to write him out of most of the film, but one of the major things I wish these films had done was to utilize the opportunity to deepen those characters which might have been considered shallow in the original series rather than devote so much attention to Kirk and Spock. Trek has always been an ensemble-based show and I believe the writing should have reflected that in the transition to film, especially if they were planning on making half a dozen of them.
I admit I also wasn’t all that impressed with our two major non-main cast characters in the picture, helmsman Valeris (played by Kim Cattrall) and the *SPOILER* antagonist General Chang. Apparently Kim’s direction on how to play a stoic alien zen buddhist was ‘regular person speaking at a formal function’, way too similar to Spock in temperament without having earned that development. As for Chang, visually he continues the theme of nostalgia by making him an OST-style Klingon, which means he basically looks like a dude dressed as a pirate in a room full of dudes dressed like aliens. His whole ‘quoting Shakespeare’ gimmick makes him more memorable than Christopher Lloyd’s character in Star Trek III, but he does it so often it gets tedious, and comes across as kind of a Kahn-lite. While the story itself has multiple layers to it, Star Trek VI opts instead to undercut that by making Chang into the tired ‘dastardly Klingon’ cliche. They could have easily used the mutual enmity between the Federation and the Klingons to make Chang a nuanced villain, a dark mirror of Kirk perhaps, but instead they have him twirling his metaphorical mustache (as opposed to his actual mustache) doing bad things for seemingly no other reason than that he’s an asshole. Rather bland when you consider that you could see more interesting Klingons just by staying at home and turning on TNG.
It could be that extreme dislike of Star Trek V is causing my brain to overcompensate, but I’m going to give Star Trek VI the recommendation. Nicholas Meyer doesn’t blow the roof of the joint but he does manage to close this series out on a high note, and while I might have personally wanted more, it’s nice to see the crew of the old Enterprise ride off into the sunset one last time. Overall I’d say my experience with the OST Trek films hasn’t strayed too far from the popular consensus: I liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the only one on the planet seems like), liked Wrath of Kahn, can barely remember anything about Search for Spock, liked The Voyage Home, hated The Final Frontier, and now liked The Undiscovered Country. An above average experience! Does that mean then that next year’s Marathon will see us digging into the Next Generation Trek films? Maybe, but before that we’ve got one more book that needs closing…
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