Lower Decks

And so it happened that Star Trek finally had to do what it had long avoided, had in fact, done everything to avoid, including the virtually unprecedented move of sticking with the same actors in their original roles for near-three decades, and pretty much two decades that amounted to four additional casts. After all that, the popular culture could stand nothing more from the franchise, nothing more, that is, than the reboot. And so, in the summer of 2009, that’s exactly what finally happened.

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The fourth and final ‘Next Generation’ film was released in 2002 and made a very tiny amount at the box office, the least of the ten entries in the Star Trek movie series to that date, relegating the franchise to a cultural afterthought, a somewhat strange fate for a cast that had once had the potential to push it to new heights.

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December 1998 fell in the middle of the final season of ‘Deep Space Nine,’ the fifth of ‘Voyager,’ and apparently far from much interest in a new Star Trek movie. Despite the considerable success of ‘First Contact’ two years earlier, ‘Insurrection’ arrived to minimal interest, and a very different tone from its predecessor, ensuring that even those who had gotten into the concept of ‘Next Generation’ feature films would find this one easy to overlook.

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As it has been since 1996, ‘First Contact’ is my favorite Star Trek film. (Here’s the official order, for those who like to keep score: 1)‘First Contact,’ 2) ‘Star Trek,’ 3) ‘The Motion Picture,’ 4) ‘Nemesis,’ 5) ‘Generations,’ 6) ‘The Search for Spock,’ 7) ‘The Voyage Home,’ ‘The Wrath of Khan,’ 9) ‘Insurrection,’ 10) ‘The Undiscovered Country,’ and 11) ‘The Final Frontier.’) Of the whole series to date, it’s the one that most succeeds in simply being a film. I get chills watching it.

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Three years after ‘The Undiscovered Country’ and just a few months after “All Good Things…” concluded their TV adventures, the ‘Next Generation’ crew ascended to the big screen in what was deemed by Paramount an inevitability. To assist in the transition was Captain Kirk, who would at last share time with his successor, Jean-Luc Picard. It was to be the biggest moment yet in franchise lore.

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1991 was a special year in franchise lore. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary. Above and beyond the failure of ‘The Final Frontier,’ fans still had an abundance of affection for a cast they had followed for so many years. It would take a lot more than one bad experience to kill Star Trek again, especially now that five films and a second TV series and crew had been introduced. One final film with the original cast was warranted, and probably demanded, for the occasion, and so was released ‘The Undiscovered Country.’

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1989 saw a unique challenge for Star Trek. For the first time in its history, there would be two competing incarnations. ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ was entering its third season, while the original series crew prepared to continue what had suddenly become a popular film series. Where the TV show was entering into new creative heights, infused with emerging voices behind the scenes that would soon take the franchise into startling new directions, the fifth film was undertaken by a combination of players who had never successfully guided Star Trek on their own. Harve Bennett always benefited from his collaborations with Nicholas Meyer, while the director for ‘The Final Frontier,’ William Shatner, continually struggled against his own ego. Is it really any surprise that the result was, at least until that point, the least successful venture in franchise history?

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Star Trek is always at its best when it is deliberately crowd-pleasing, as evidenced by all the episodes in the original series that continue to be warmly remembered to this day: “The Naked Time,” “Shore Leave,” “The Trouble with Tribbles.” So it’s no surprise that the original cast met its greatest film success in the time travel romp ‘The Voyage Home.’

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The movie in the entire film series that I think has always gotten the shaft, and for no discernable reason, other than coming between the ones fans (‘Wrath of Khan’) and general audiences (‘The Voyage Home’) really love, the middle part of the original crew trilogy that can be too easily dismissed as merely utilitarian. My argument is that it’s so much more than that. It may be, pound for pound, the most completely satisfying Star Trek movie.

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Whatever else ‘The Motion Picture’ had been, it was a relative failure, one that disappointed fans and general audiences, but it was success enough to have demanded a sequel, and so work was quickly begun to figure out how exactly to follow it up. Even that was proving difficult, however, until Nicholas Meyer sauntered in and changed everything. When the finished product was delivered to theaters in 1982, Star Trek had delivered the word, and the word was “good.”

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