Well, here we are. I actually had to go out to a shop and buy a copy of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier on DVD, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to write this review. Before making this noble sacrifice, I think I’ve only seen this particular instalment in the movie series twice, once at the original cinematic release, and once on TV. It has the reputation of being the worst of all the Star Trek films, and for good reason.

It opens in Yosemite Valley, where the Enterprise bridge crew are spending shore leave on a camping trip. Kirk is shown free climbing El Capitan, a feat that by all rights should be physically beyond anyone of William Shatner’s physical condition at the time. He is saved from falling to his death by Spock, in a Chekhov’s-gun-setup use of gravity boots. Kirk says he was never worried, since he’s always known that he will die alone.

On the distant planet Nimbus III, we see a wretched hive town. The Romulan ambassador Caithlin arrives at a seedy bar (complete with a catgirl alien), and explains in excruciating expositionary detail to the human and Klingon ambassadors there that Nimbus III is the “The Planet of Galactic Peace”. The peace is short-lived, as a strange mystical Vulcan and his fanatical followers attack the place and take the ambassadors hostage.

The Enterprise crew are called back to deal with the hostage situation, but the ship is in a mess, despite Scotty working full time on it. Basically anything on the ship that could be broken is broken, for no explicable reason. It’s mind-boggling to think a military vessel not actually in combat would ever be allowed to get into such a state – it really makes no sense at all.

We’re then treated to a shot of a Klingon vessel blowing up an Earth space probe, apparently just for the heck of it. The probe looks remarkably like Voyager, bringing up echoes of V-ger from the first film. The Klingon commander (who is a glam rock star, judging by his hairdo) is ordered to Nimbus as well, and starts salivating at the prospect of destroying Kirk and the Enterprise.

The Enterprise arrives at Nimbus and Kirk decides the best way to approach the city is on space-horses. Nichelle Nichols has to undergo her most embarrassing acting scene ever, as she does a fan dance to distract some nomads so the guys can steal horses and ride into the city. But the ambassador hostages have become followers of the Vulcan, who Spock recognises as the renegade Sybok, and they capture the heroes. Mixed up in a fight scene Spock gives a Vulcan nerve pinch to a horse; apparently their physiology is enough like humanoids that it works on them too.

They take a shuttlecraft back to Enterprise (evading the Klingons mentioned earlier on the way) – the shuttlecraft pickup scene has very strong echoes of the landing scene in Alien. When the shuttle lands on the Enterprise, Spock has a chance to kill Sybok and end the entire crisis, but he refuses to kill his own brother. Wait… Spock has a brother?! Half-brother, it turns out, since Sarek apparently had a Vulcan wife before Amanda – something never before (or after) hinted at in any Star Trek canon. Also wait… why didn’t Spock just set the weapon on stun and shoot Sybok? I guess that particular gun only had a kill setting.

Sybok takes control of the Enterprise and tosses Kirk and Spock in the brig. The toilet in the brig has an obvious sign on it: “Do not use while in space dock”. Presumably somebody on the writing team thought that was funny. Scotty busts them out, after warning them to stand back by tapping on the other side of the brig wall in Morse code. The gravity boots reappear as a way to quickly move up and down the access tubes of the ship.

Sybok is taking the ship to the centre of the galaxy, to find the Vulcan legendary world of Sha Ka Ree, where he hopes to find God. They get there and meet a being who looks and sounds like God, and asks to be taken away on their ship to spread his word throughout the galaxy. Kirk asks the only memorable line of the film: “Excuse me, what does God need with a starship?” “God” goes into a rage, Sybok sees through it and sacrifices himself to give the others time to escape. The Klingon ship reappears, but the Klingon ambassador who Kirk and Spock saved arranges for it to fire a torpedo at “God”, killing it. The Enterprise and Klingon vessel part company on peaceful terms, and the heroes head back to Yosemite to finish their camping trip.

Whew, I’m glad to have that one over and done with. About the only highlight of the film is Jerry Goldsmith’s music. It opens the film in fine style, with echoes of the original TV series theme, before segueing into the Motion Picture/Next Generation theme, which sounds much more refined and enveloping than in the first film. Throughout the movie, while cringing at what was happening on screen, I was enjoying the music. There are a lot of bad scenes in this film, and the overall story is simply dull and uninspiring. The best moments are the camping sequences that book-end the film, and the scene on the Enterprise where it’s shown to have an old-fashioned sailing-ship-style wheelhouse room, complete with brass and wood ship’s wheel. Now that’s what a starship bridge should look like! If you haven’t seen this film for a long time, like I had, you’re not missing much.

Tropes: Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb, Catch A Falling Star, Not The Fall That Kills You, Chekhov’s Gun, Tricked-Out Shoes, Wretched Hive, Mr Exposition, Cat Girl, Expospeak, ’80s Hair, Horse Of A Different Colour, Show Some Leg, Long Lost Relative, Canon Discontinuity, Everyone Knows Morse, Armour Piercing Question, No Such Thing As Space Jesus, Heroic Sacrifice, Book Ends.
Body count: “God”, Sybok.

Like the movie before it, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a direct continuation of the previous instalment in the series. It opens with a recap of the previous two films, followed by an upbeat musical theme over the main titles. This music has distinctive glockenspiel notes in it, twinkling in the manner of stars in space – a nice effect.

The opening scenes show a mysterious black cylinder moving through space past the USS Saratoga, which reports it’s headed straight for Earth, in an eerie mirror of V-ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Then we cut to Starfleet headquarters on Earth, where the Klingon ambassador is calling for Kirk to be extradited and tried for destroying a Klingon vessel and crew (in the previous film). During this accusal we are treated yet again to the Genesis computer graphics created for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and repeated in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, since in 1986 they still looked impressive. Sarek argues in Kirk’s defence.

On Vulcan, Kirk and his crew are banging the captured Klingon bird-of-prey from the last movie into shape for the trip back to Earth to face the consequences of stealing the Enterprise in the previous movie. They lampshade the rather silly predicament that Starfleet hasn’t bothered to send a better ship to pick them up and take them back to Earth for court martial. Spock is still rebuilding his intellect after his brush with death and we see him studying with some computers asking him tricky questions, when one asks, “How do you feel?” Spock is stumped, and his mother appears and reveals she programmed the computers to ask him this, to remind him of his human heritage. Spock takes his leave without answering her and elects to return to Earth to face trial with his colleagues.

Back at Earth, the mysterious probe arrives and starts vapourising the oceans. Things rapidly deteriorate, to the point where the President of the Federation issues a distress call, stating that the probe has “almost totally ionised the atmosphere“! (While this is possible, everything on Earth would be dead already.) When our heroes arrive, they cleverly figure out that the probe is transmitting sound into the Earth’s oceans. Modifying the sound to what it would sound like underwater, Spock recognises it as whale song. They quickly realise that the probe must have come to investigate why the sounds of whales ceased coming from Earth a couple of hundred years ago – when they died out. To respond and stop the probe, they need whales. Thus is hatched a hare-brained scheme to travel back in time to before they became extinct and pick some up!

We are treated to some trippy mind-screw hallucinatory images as the Klingon ship slingshots around the sun and is flung back to… 1986! Uhura reports that she is “receiving whalesong!” One wonders how the whales are transmitting it into space – presumably through the same means they use to communicate with the mysterious probe’s civilisation. They land in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, with the ship cloaked – thus explaining why they had to retain the Klingon ship, since Federation vessels don’t have cloaking technology. Interestingly, in the previous movie, the cloaking device on this same ship produced a rippling effect against the background stars in space that allowed Sulu to see the ship anyway, but now it produces complete and utterly flawless invisibility. Presumably Scotty did some of his magical engineering tweaks on it to improve it.

In town, this being San Francisco, nobody comments on their weird 23rd century clothing, especially Spock’s nightrobe-like Vulcan garb. Kirk is shocked to learn the natives are “still using money”. He sells the antique pair of glasses McCoy gave him at the beginning of Star Trek II. When Spock protests that they were a gift from McCoy, Kirk says, “That’s the beauty of it, they will be again,” implying the glasses enter a stable time loop. The group splits up, Kirk and Spock to look for whales, Scotty and McCoy to find some materials to build a whale tank inside the ship, Sulu to arrange transport for the materials, and Uhura and Chekov to locate a nuclear reactor so they can scavenge some high energy photons to recharge the ship’s warp engines. Scotty also generates a time loop when he teaches a materials scientist how to make transparent aluminium in exchange for some plexiglass. When McCoy protests that he could be messing with history, Scotty rather flippantly dismisses him with, “How do we know he didn’t invent it?” This is dealt with better in the novelisation, in which Scotty recognises the man as the guy who actually did invent transparent aluminium, thus reducing the flippant disregard for creating a time paradox.

Kirk and Spock find some whales at a fictional Cetacean Institute in Sausolito, as well as their carer Gillian. Kirk woos Gillian and eventually tells her they are from the future and need the whales. She rejects him, but comes back to find him when her boss releases the whales into the open sea, where they will be hunted and killed by whalers. Meanwhile, Uhura and Chekov locate a reactor, on board the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise(!), and beam in, getting into trouble when Chekov, a Russian, is caught inside an American naval vessel, at the height of the Cold War. He tries to escape but is injured and rushed to hospital, where the others stage a rescue mission. Then they fly out with Gillian on board to locate the whales’ tracking devices. They find them just before they are about to be harpooned by some evil Scandinavians, beam them aboard into the tank, and fly home to the future.

There they release the whales into San Francisco Bay to repopulate the species, the probe is happy and departs, and the Earth is saved! At the court martial, all charges are dropped due to extenuating circumstances, except the charge against Kirk of disobeying orders, for which he is demoted from Admiral to Captain, and therefore given command of a ship. The Klingon ambassador is outraged and Sarek is smug. Spock tells Sarek to tell his mother, “I feel fine.” The crew head to their new ship… which is revealed to be a brand new Enterprise. Awwww.

This is a very different Trek movie, which played more heavily with humour and light-hearted action than drama. And it worked, it really did. Some of the comedy moments with Kirk and Spock in the 20th century are truly hilarious, pushing but never quite falling into slapstick and ridiculousness. It’s an incredibly fun story, which is ultimately uplifting and hopeful – just what we needed in the dark and pessimistic times of the mid 1980s. Star Trek as it was truly meant to be. Wrath of Khan is a more edgy, dramatic, tense, and probably better movie, but this one is way more fun, and easily my second favourite of the entire series.

Tropes: Big Dumb Object, Ass in Ambassador, Lampshade Hanging, Artistic Licence – Physics, Crazy Enough to Work, Space Whale, Space Whale Aesop, Changed My Jumper, Stable Time Loop, Time Travel Romance, Mistaken for Spies, Time Travellers Are Spies, Adam and Eve Plot, Green Aesop, Unishment, Fish Out of Temporal Water, Everybody Lives.
Body count: None!

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock picks up where Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan left off, after the defeat of Khan and the creation of the Genesis planet. In fact, the film opens by repeating the death of Spock scene. It also recycles the Genesis effect computer graphics from the previous film, mostly because in 1984 this was still an amazing piece of graphics.

The movie proper opens with the Enterprise limping back to Earth after the events of the previous film. On the way, McCoy is caught breaking into Spock’s quarters and acting bizarrely. We cut to a space rendezvous between a merchant ship and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey warship. Valkris, a Klingon woman aboard the merchant ship, transmits data on Genesis to Kruge, the captain of the Bird-of-Prey, who then promptly blows the other ship out of the sky, with a bittersweet adieu to Valkris for her spy work. Kruge decides to go to Genesis to learn the secret of this planet-destroying weapon. Kruge is played by Christopher “one point twenty-one jiggawatts” Lloyd, which adds touches of both coolness and oddity to the character.

On Earth, McCoy continues acting weird, making out-of-context references to Vulcan and collapsing. Spock’s father Sarek visits Kirk and engages in a cross-purposes berating of Kirk for failing Spock. The confusion is only cleared up when Sarek mind melds with Kirk, then explains that Spock would have tried to meld with someone before he died, to transfer his consciousness, or katra, to them so it could live on in their body. Kirk points out Spock was isolated in the radiation chamber, then reviews log tapes of the incident, spotting Spock touching McCoy and whispering the word, “Remember.” Sarek tells Kirk they have to get McCoy and Spock’s body to Vulcan as fast as possible or he will die.

And here’s the plot hole in the film. Kirk appeals to Admiral Morrow to get back Enterprise, but Morrow refuses because Genesis is a “political hot potato”. It looks like Kirk never explained that McCoy’s life was in danger, and there was no diplomatic word from Sarek to assist in the request. And the USS Grissom is out there surveying Genesis anyway, what’s one more ship going to do?! On board the Grissom are Saavik and David. Saavik is very disappointingly not played by Kirstie Alley, but by wooden newcomer Robin Curtis. Kruge appears and unceremoniously blows the Grissom out of the sky, with only Saavik and David surviving, doing a survey on the planet and its incredibly fake cacti and snow. They find it’s unstable, because David cut corners in the research (remind anyone of his father and the Kobayashi Maru?). They also find Spock’s torpedo tube, distressingly empty except for some giant mutated rubber worm things, which David says must have been mutated by the Genesis effect.

Back on Earth, Kirk decides to screw the rules and do what’s right, arranging with Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty to steal the Enterprise and take McCoy to Genesis then Vulcan. This is a cool sequence in which they sneak around and outsmart an unlikeable smug captain in charge of the new, faster Excelsior by having Scotty steal the space-spark-plugs. At Genesis, David and Saavik have found Spock’s body, regenerated by the Genesis effect into a mind-blanked young boy, who ages rapidly. He goes thorough pon-farr and Saavik tries to ease this by stroking his fingers in the same way that Sarek and Amanda did to demonstrate their love back in “Journey To Babel”. Hmmm. A Klingon landing party soon find them and take them prisoner.

The Enterprise arrives and there is a brief space battle in which both ships are damaged. Kruge demands Kirk surrender and hand over the Genesis device, or he will kill prisoners. Kirk tries to delay, but Kruge has one of this flunkies kill a prisoner. David interferes and gets the knife himself, sending Kirk into a rage. He says he’s surrendering, sets the Enterprise to self-destruct, and beams down to Genesis. The Klingon boarding party are blown up as the Enterprise destructs. I always figured the Enterprise would self-destruct by breaching the antimatter containment thingy, resulting in an enormous explosion that vapourises the entire ship instantly. But no, the front half of the saucer sort of blows up, leaving the rest of the ship – including the engines and the engineering section – intact. (Supposedly canon says there are two different self-destruct modes: this one, and the full-on antimatter explosion. Kirk happened to choose the milder version, so as not to destroy the Klingon ship and their only potential means of escape.) It then forms a fireball as it falls from orbit, watched by the stunned crew. It’s an emotional moment, and I vividly recall watching this scene in horror in the cinema when the film was first released.

They find the Klingons and Saavik and Spock. Kruge beams down to engage Kirk in a clifftop fistfight, in which Kirk kicks Kruge off the cliff and he falls into lava as the planet breaks up. Kirk tricks the last Klingon crew member into beaming him up and takes control of the Klingon ship. They fly it to Vulcan, where a ceremony restores Spock’s consciousness from McCoy into the regenerated body of Spock. Spock is naturally a bit shaken by being split in half, killed, regenerated, and recombined, but the film ends in a feel-good scene when he recognises his friends. And the adventure continues…

EDIT: Oh, I suppose I should add my opinions on this film. Well, it’s not terrible, but it’s not great either. The biggest emotional impact comes from the destruction of the Enterprise (by which time it’s pretty clear that Spock would be coming back to life). Lloyd as Kruge is good. The sets and props are not great, particularly the fake looking scenery on the Genesis planet and the rubber worms which Kruge strangles. Curtis as Saavik is disappointing and stiff. The stealing of the Enterprise sequence is very cool. Overall… eh… middling.

Tropes: Face Death With Dignity, Our Souls Are Different, Sharing A Body, Obstructive Bureaucrat, The Other Darrin, Screw the Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right, Smug Snake, Vehicular Sabotage, Stolen MacGufin Reveal, Back From The Dead, Rapid Aging, Heroic Sacrifice, Self-Destruct Mechanism, Disney Villain Death, Lethal Lava Land, And The Adventure Continues.
Body count: Valkris and all on board merchant ship (destroyed by Klingon Bird-of-Prey), All hands on board USS Grissom, Klingon gunner (shot by Kruge), David (stabbed by a Klingon), various Klingon crew (blown up on board Enterprise), Klingon crewman (shot by Kirk), Kruge (falls off cliff), USS Enterprise (self destruct).

Ah, now here we have something. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what really drove me to continue this series of reviews into the films. It is widely regarded as the best of the original cast Star Trek films. Watching it again, I am reminded forcefully why this is the case.

Although, the music over the credits is nowhere near as memorable as the music from the first movie. Perhaps just because that music was later used for The Next Generation, whereas this one still sounds unfamiliar (despite me having seen the movie multiple times). The opening scene makes up for it though, with the new character Saavik apparently in command of the Enterprise, in the now-famous Kobayashi Maru simulation. The impressive 1980s computer graphics are no match for the young Kirstie Alley, who bravely orders the ship into the Klingon Neutral Zone (the lesser known cousin of the more famous Romulan Neutral Zone, which is probably why we haven’t ever heard of it before now). In the simulated attack, Spock “dies”, prompting Kirk’s witty, “Aren’t you dead?” line a bit later when they meet. That’s an interesting bit of foreshadowing I hadn’t really noticed before.

We then get to see Kirk’s apartment, with a gorgeous view overlooking San Francisco Bay. The crew arrive to celebrate his birthday, and we learn that Kirk apparently has a fondness for antiques – something that somehow eluded our perception in three years of episodes. McCoy gives him a pair of eyeglasses, which Kirk has to amusingly ask what they are. Spock gives Kirk an antique edition of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, from which Kirk reads the opening lines.

Meanwhile, Chekov is on the USS Reliant, surveying planets to find a dead world for testing of the mysterious Genesis project. He and Captain Terrell check out Ceti Alpha VI, beaming down to check out some weird sensor readings. They find a shipwreck, sending Chekov into a panic when he discovers the nameplate Botany Bay. But it’s too late to escape, as one of the most awesome dramatic reveals in cinema history occurs. The cloth-swathed figure who captures them is slowly revealed (to the best music of the movie) to be none other than Khan, last seen in the episode “Space Seed“, in which Kirk stranded the genetic superman and his followers on Ceti Alpha V. It turns out there was a planetary catastrophe soon afterwards, disrupting the orbits and rendering Ceti Alpha V almost uninhabitable (and now apparently the 6th planet out). Khan’s wife died, and now he wants nothing but revenge on Kirk.

Khan sticks nasty parasites into Chekov and Terrell’s ears; the parasites’ mental influence gives him command over them. He uses this to capture the Reliant, go to and destroy the Genesis research base, and then ambush Kirk when he arrives to investigate what’s going on. Kirk is led there by a call from Genesis lead scientist (and old flame) Carol Marcus, when Khan makes her believe that Kirk ordered the civilian project turned over to Starfleet. To explain Genesis to Spock, McCoy, and the audience, Kirk plays a classified recording or Carol presenting the research proposal. We are treated to stunningly impressive computer graphics for 1982 (they look dated now, but it was genuinely mind-blowing then), showing the “Genesis effect” transforming a dead rocky planet at the molecular level into one primed to support life. As McCoy points out, it could also be used to wipe out an entire populated planet.

When Kirk arrives at the research station, Khan is ready, and cripples the Enterprise with a pre-emptive attack. Kirk pulls a trick to deactivate Reliant‘s shields and get a shot in, and the two ships withdraw. Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik check the research station and find dead scientists, barely alive Chekov and Terrell, and a transporter recently set to beam inside the nearby asteroid. Spock on board the Enterprise reports the transporters have died and Kirk asks how long until they are repaired. In a transparent piece of codespeak, Spock tells Kirk “hours would seem like days” and that they will be ready in two days. It’s kind of clever, since they know Khan will be listening in, but it’s a bit of a plothole that Khan (a genius, remember) can’t decipher the real meaning of this message.

In the meantime, the landing party beams down inside the asteroid, finding a hollowed chamber. Carol’s son David attacks Kirk, thinking he’s behind the attack, but she calls him off. Chekov and Terrell reveal they are still under Khan’s mental command, and contact Khan, who beams up the Genesis device. Terrell kills a redshirt scientist who tries to jump him, then fights off the parasite’s influence and turns the phaser on himself. Chekov collapses and McCoy tends to him. Carol explains to Kirk that David is his son, and then they reveal an enormous cave in the asteroid, terraformed by Genesis. On cue, two hours later, Spock beams them aboard and the final showdown with Khan commences.

The Enterprise limps to the Mutara Nebula, which clouds ship’s sensors and gives them an even chance against the less damaged Reliant. Khan again plays against his alleged genius intellect by famously thinking “two dimensionally” as Spock points out. Kirk commands the recovered Chekov to pilot the Enterprise down, and they manage to get behind Khan this way and deliver a killing blow. Khan decides to take Kirk with him, activating the Genesis device in a ploy to convert the entire nebula and everything within it into a new planet. The Enterprise can’t get out without warp drive, and the engines can’t be fixed because of radiation flooding the engine chamber.

Unknown to Kirk, Spock races down the engineering. McCoy tries to stop him entering the chamber, but Spock nerve pinches him, then in an odd move grips the unconscious McCoy in the Vulcan mind meld grip and whispers, “Remember.” Spock then enters the chamber and performs the necessary repairs, allowing the ship to escape in the nick of time as the nebula implodes. Kirk breathes a sigh of relief, interrupted as he notices Spock is not on the bridge and by McCoy calling from engineering and saying to get down there. Kirk arrives in time for poignant last words as Spock dies on the other side of the clear radiation screen. After a moving funeral, they shoot his body into space in a torpedo casing over the new Genesis planet, presumably to burn up in re-entry.

In the denouement, David and Kirk come to terms with their relationship. Then on the bridge, Kirk quotes the ending lines of A Tale of Two Cities, bookending this literary reference to Spock’s sacrifice to save his friends. The final shot is of the Genesis planet, on which we see Spock’s torpedo tube, apparently soft-landed. The famous “Space, the final frontier” speech is then delivered for the first time in the franchise by Leonard Nimoy.

The revenge theme is what drives this film. And despite the more obvious use of A Tale of Two Cities, it is another book that forms the core of the film. As Chekov and Terrell are surveying the wreck of the Botany bay, we see a copy of Moby-Dick on a shelf. Khan is Captain Ahab, and Kirk is his white whale. The parallels are deliberately played up, including the final showdown game of cat and mouse in the Mutara Nebula between the Enterprise and Khan’s captured Reliant that echoes battle on the high seas. Khan’s last words are even a direct quote of Ahab’s. And in a piece of coincidence that couldn’t have been better if it was engineered, Ceti Alpha is the brightest star in the constellation of Cetus – the whale.

This film is so much better than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in so many ways. The villain is more accessible, more real, more threatening, more of an actual villain. There’s real conflict. There’s more emotionally involving backstory, as Kirk faces up to old age, and to his past. There’s a young Kirstie Alley. There’s more quotable dialogue. There’s more intense drama and tension. There’s Starfleet uniforms that actually look good. I’ve seen some reports floating around the net that this used to be generally considered the best original cast Star Trek film, but that nowadays many people prefer VI: The Undiscovered Country. I went into this viewing open-minded, knowing I’d be reviewing both films eventually. But watching it again just makes me more certain that this one is the best. By far.

Tropes: Naive Newcomer, Unwinnable Training Simulation, Sealed Evil In A Can, Bus Crash, Best Served Cold, Orifice Invasion, Puppeteer Parasite, Technology Porn, Genesis Effect, Creating Life, Doomsday Device, Cryptic Conversation, Luke, You Are My Father, Ham To Ham Combat, Space Clouds, 2-D Space, Taking You With Me, Heroic Sacrifice, Outrun The Fireball, Anyone Can Die, Whole Plot Reference, Space Is An Ocean.
Body count: Peter Preston (killed in initial attack on Enterprise), 5+ scientists (killed by Khan’s mob), 1 scientist (phasered by Captain Terrell), Captain Terrell (phasers self), Joachim (victim of Kirk’s attack on Reliant), Khan (Genesis explosion), all Khan’s followers (Genesis explosion or final attack), Spock (selfless sacrifice).

Well that break didn’t last long. I found myself pondering what to watch on a spare Friday evening and my hand drifted to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first movie entry in the series and the first new Star Trek since the TV series ended in 1969, ten years earlier. I remember this movie with some fondness, because it was the first Star Trek I got to see in first release, and on the big screen to boot. I remember being immersed in the wonder of spaceships and the pretty visuals. Being only a kid at the time I think the story was mostly lost on me.

And that’s kind of how it appears in the canon now, in the ripeness of time. It’s a luscious visual feast and a nostalgic return to something already loved, but not a strong piece of film in its own right. It plods along and is cerebral rather than exciting. I have the Director’s Edition DVD (one of several recuts of the film to make it work better), which runs to 141 minutes on PAL (it’d be a solid 2 and a half hours on NTSC). The first 2 minutes and 50 seconds of that is an orchestral overture accompanied by a receding starfield image and nothing else. It feels like attending a concert. And I remember being grossly disappointed by that music when I first heard it in the cinema. I was hoping for a rendition of the theme from the TV series, but instead I got this… foreign, unfamiliar music. But that theme is now intimately familiar, as it was used as the theme music for Star Trek The Next Generation. And watching the movie again, I have to say that Jerry Goldsmith’s music is one of the highlights of the film. It’s given prominence by the many scenes in which nothing happens but panning and sweeping shots of space exteriors to the accompaniment of the music. You could almost close your eyes watching this film and enjoy it as much.

The overture eventually ends and we are treated to and opening scene of three Klingon vessels attacking a mysterious space cloud thing. Klingons!! Awesome, I remember, when I was that excited kid in the cinema seeing this for the first time. The movie was going to be a huge space shoot-out between Klingons and Captain Kirk on the Enterprise! What’s not to love?! (I was prejudiced somewhat by the recently released Star Wars, 2 years earlier.) Except it didn’t turn out that way. The Klingons are merely there to show how impossibly powerful and impervious this cloud thing is, as it destroys them each without lifting a cloudy muscle. The Klingons, by the way, are the first appearance of the modern brow-ridged variety, and look much cooler than the Klingons ever looked in the TV series.

There’s a scene of Spock on Vulcan, apparently failing some sort of ceremonial logic thingy. We switch to Starfleet Headquarters, which apparently has taken over the Presidio in San Francisco, where Kirk is revealed to be an Admiral, but is heading up to the newly refitted Enterprise to take command, as the hostile cloud thingy is headed straight for Earth. Kirk beams up to an orbital station – the transporters have been upgraded with late-1970s special effects and now take twice as long to do their job. We are treated to a full four and a half minutes of orchestral starship strip-tease as Scotty takes Kirk over to the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft, flying lovingly around the Enterprise in a sensual manner.

Kirk relieves Captain Decker of his command, setting up the only real tension in the movie. The crew are rushing to get the ship ready for departure, and not all the systems are working yet. This is demonstrated when Starfleet tries to beam science officer Sonak and another crew member directly on board, only for them to get mangled. In a welcome return, Janice Rand is now the transporter chief. When she gets the contraption working properly, the last crew member to beam aboard is a bearded and reluctant McCoy, who complains about having been drafted back into service. With his beard and giant gold pendant around his neck, he looks more like a Bee Gee than a doctor, dammit! Another crew member is the exotic Deltan navigator Ilia, who makes a bizarre comment about having an oath of celibacy on record with Starfleet. This makes sense when you know the back-story given in the novelisation (which I had and read, though it took me some years to figure out what “celibacy” meant) about Deltans producing human-affecting pheromones and being so sexually advanced that any human having sex with a Deltan would be consumed by addictive lust – but none of that is ever mentioned in the film, making it weird and inexplicable.

34 and a half minutes into the film, the Enterprise finally gets underway, with another 2 minutes of visual starship porn. A very cool feature of this Enterprise is that it is not lit by some mysterious ambient lighting that pervades space and conveniently illuminates space ships. It’s dark, and lit only by an appropriately directional light from the sun and exterior running lights. The ship looks fantastic. It heads out at Warp 0.5, passing Jupiter in 1.8 hours (which implies Warp 0.5 is about a quarter the speed of light). The problem is when they try the warp engines, which haven’t been tested since the refit. They produce a wormhole and the ship is in danger of being destroyed by an asteroid. Kirk tries to fire phasers, but Decker overrules him and uses a torpedo to destroy the asteroid, explaining later that the phasers now go through the warp drive, so wouldn’t have worked. 1-1 Kirk-Decker. McCoy is straight into his most important role – not doctor, but advisor to Kirk, telling not to push people so hard. It’s now that you become acutely aware that something is missing from the old team: Spock.

Cue the appearance of a mysterious long-range shuttle, which deposits Spock, fresh from Vulcan. He fixes the engines, then explains how he felt a “mind” calling to him from the mystery cloud. As they approach the cloud, Spock becomes more contemplative. The cloud fires at the Enterprise, injuring nobody but Chekov as his panel explodes. Another shot will destroy them, but Spock notices the cloud is using frequencies of “a million megahertz” (i.e. terahertz radiation), and broadcasts friendship messages at that frequency, which halts the attack. They spend another half an hour of screen time flying into the depths of the cloud, past lots of cool scenery. Eventually the cloud gets bored and probes the Enterprise, disintegrating Ilia. She reappears as a robotic reconstruction, assigned to investigate the “carbon units” (i.e. life forms) on board Enterprise. Decker draws the short straw of showing robo-Ilia around.

Spock leaves the ship in a space suit to try to meld with the cloud’s mind, and comes back half dead, but with a story about it being perfectly logical, but with no sense of who it is. The cloud is curious and naive. Robo-Ilia says the cloud is named V’ger, and V’ger demands information about its creator, which for some reason it thinks is on Earth. If its creator does not respond, it will destroy all the carbon units on Earth. In typical style, Kirk bluffs, saying he needs to talk to V’ger personally to explain why the creator hasn’t responded. Robo-Ilia takes him, McCoy, Spock, and Decker out of the ship, across a Giant’s Causeway of hexagonal blocks, to a dilapidated but eerily familiar looking space probe. Kirk reads the name plate: “V—GER”, and brushes off the dirt to reveal “VOYAGER 6”, an Earth probe launched in the 20th century and lost into “what they used to call a black hole”. Apparently its programming was corrupted and it returned to Earth to seek what it thought was its creator and destroy everything else. Shades of Nomad, from the TV episode “The Changeling“, anyone? Anyway, they try transmitting the download code to V’ger, but it burns its own wiring out, forcing the creator to physically reconnect it and join with V’ger. Decker volunteers and melds with Robo-Ilia in a symbolic rebirth thing, leaving just the Enterprise and a saved Earth to fade into the end credits.

It’s not a bad story. It’s just… watching it is a very… leisurely experience. There are several nice scenes. The music is good and the special effects are very nice for the 1970s. The story makes more sense in the novelisation, where it actually has some exposition. There are themes that could have been explored here – the relations between the power trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in particular – that aren’t developed until the following films. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. About the same as a mid-range TV episode – about the same as “The Changeling”, in fact.

Tropes: Kicked Upstairs, Leave The Camera Running, Teleporter Accident, Mandatory Unretirement, Our Wormholes Are Different, Putting The Band Back Together, Russian Guy Suffers Most, Robot Girl, Machine Monotone, Recycled Script, Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence.
Body count: Crew of three Klingon battle cruisers, entire personnel of Epsilon IX station (all vapourised by V’ger), Commander Sonak, unnamed female crew member (both mutated in transporter accident), Lieutenant Ilia (zapped by V’ger), Commander Decker (officially listed as “missing”).

“Turnabout Intruder” is the last episode of Star Trek, and what a dismal ending.

Kirk meets yet another old flame from his academy days, Dr Janice Lester, part of an archaeological expedition on some planet that sends a distress call. Lester is ill, but as soon as she and Kirk are alone she activates an alien device that swaps her mind with that of Kirk’s. It turns out she is insane with envy of Kirk’s starship captain position, and resentment of the fact that (in her mind) it was because she is a woman that she could not succeed as well as Kirk.

The rest of the episode is spent with William Shatner hamming it up as the mind of an insane woman in Kirk’s body. “Kirk” uses his authority to have “Lester” (with Kirk’s mind) safely sedated in sick bay, but “Lester” manages to talk to Spock and convinces him that it’s Kirk’s mind inside. Spock can’t convince anyone else though, and “Kirk” organises a court martial for mutiny. McCoy and Scotty don’t know what to make of the situation, though the fact that “Kirk” is suddenly clearly bug-nuts insane in between filing his nails should ring some bells. And all the time there’s this rippling 1960s-style sexist undercurrent that Lester lost it because she could never be as powerful as a man, and couldn’t accept that like other women. It seems like in the Star Trek universe women can have positions of power, but Lester seems to blame her own incompetence on the “fact” that they can’t – so it’s a rather mixed message here.

There could have been a dramatic ending, but it’s deus ex machinaed away by the expedient of Lester going even more insane and losing her grip on Kirk’s body, so the mind swap simply wears off. It’s a lame ending to an uncomfortable story, about the only redeeming feature of which (by which I mean so-bad-it’s-funny) is Shatner’s positively loopy over-acting.

Well, it’s been a long ride through all the episodes, and what a downer to end on, but there were definite highlights along the way. I’m not sure if I’ll continue with any more of these sort of reviews. I might have a few months off and then see what I feel like watching.

Tropes: Grand Theft Me, Driven By Envy, I Just Want To Be You, Female Misogynist, Large Ham, Evil Is Hammy, Kangaroo Court, Anti-Mutiny, Axe Crazy, Different For Girls, Values Dissonance, Stay In The Kitchen, Deus Ex Machina, Reset Button Ending.
Body count: None!

“All Our Yesterdays” is an episode I remember well because I had the Fotonovel version of it when I was a kid. Watching it again was actually pleasant, because of the feeling of nostalgia, and the fact that I think this is a decent episode.

It starts with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beaming down to a planet that is about to get destroyed by its sun going nova in a few hours (timed to the minute by the Enterprise, apparently). There’s supposed to be a large native population without spaceflight technology, but they seem to have all vanished. In a library, they find only one old man, Atoz, and a couple of his clones, who keep talking cryptically about hurrying up and getting to safety. Kirk never sits the guy down and asks him a straight question to find out what happened to everyone, so this part is a bit farcical, but it does build the mystery.

The library is full of memory discs, which show images of the planet’s history. While viewing one, Kirk hears a woman calling for help from through an archway, and of course races off to investigate. Spock and McCoy follow hot on his heels. Kirk appears in a street populated by people out of witch hunt Salem, and fights off some ruffians who are harassing a woman. Spock and McCoy appear in a snowy wilderness. They can talk to each other, but can’t get back to the library. Kirk gets into a sword fight, and is captured and thrown into a cell, where a prosecutor comes to accuse him of witchcraft. Meanwhile, McCoy starts freezing to death (despite Spock being the one from a hot planet and unused to the cold) and he and Spock trudge through the snow until they meet a mysterious figure clad in furs. It turns out to be a beautiful woman named Zarabeth, who Spock starts falling in love with when she strips down to a few strategically placed scraps of leather.

The story makes little sense to this point, but suddenly the pieces start falling into place. Kirk mentions to the prosecutor that he came from the library, and the prosecutor lets slip that he knows about it. He explains that everyone fled the nova through a time portal, so they could live out their lives in their own planet’s history. Spock and McCoy must have gone to a different time period because they were looking at a different memory disc. The prosecutor explains Kirk can never go back because his molecular structure has been changed by a machine in the library to suit the new time he is in, but when Kirk says he underwent no such process, the prosecutor tells him he must hurry back or die. He takes Kirk to the portal and Kirk finds his way back, where Atoz is most upset and tries to keep pushing him back through.

Kirk orders Atoz to locate the ice age disc so he can get Spock and McCoy back. But in the ice age, the normally vegetarian Spock is eating meat and kissing Zarabeth and getting mad at McCoy, who keeps insisting they try to get back. Zarabeth says they can’t go back, and Spock meekly agrees. McCoy argues that Spock is losing his logical mind because they’re 5000 years in the past, when Vulcans were still savages. This is a cool bit of storytelling logic, but it would have made more sense if Spock’s molecular structure had been altered to match 5000 years ago. Anyway, McCoy convinces Spock to look for the portal, conveniently just as Kirk locates the right disc, and they return to the present after a sad farewell to Zarabeth. Atoz dashes into the portal, and the crew beam back and warp out just before the sun explodes.

There are some plot holes, including the fact that Atoz keeps trying to push Kirk through the portal without adjusting his molecular structure, and the whole miscommunication thing with him. But those aside, I really like this episode. It has mystery, drama, conflict, a cool use of time travel, and it kinda makes sense. I call this one a winner from season 3.

Tropes: Literary Allusion Title, Ancient Keeper, Cloning Blues, Portal Door, Flynning, Changed My Jumper, Burn The Witch, Girl Of The Week, Fur Bikini, Cool Gate, Trapped In The Past, Temporal Sickness, Get Back To The Future, Veganopia, Meat Versus Veggies.
Body count: None!

“The Savage Curtain” is another episode I didn’t remember any details of until after I started watching it, and then it was not until about halfway through that I remembered the remaining major plot elements. It starts with the Enterprise surveying a dull and supposedly lifeless volcanic planet, only to find Abraham Lincoln, complete in monumental chair, appear on their viewscreen as if floating in space. He asks to be beamed aboard, and Kirk displays an odd reverence for what is presumably an alien trick by according “Lincoln” full presidential honours. There’s an interesting point when Lincoln asks if they still measure time in minutes, and Kirk says “we can convert”.

After some time filling byplay on board, Kirk, Spock, and Lincoln beam down to a mysteriously habitable area on the planet, where they meet Surak, a similarly long dead and revered Vulcan. The jig is revealed to be an experiment by one of the natives of the planet, a semi-omnipotent being made of rock. It wishes to understand the strange carbon-based concepts of “good” and “evil”. Of course, what better way to do this than to arrange an involuntary battle to the death between representatives of both sides!? (That’s an average of 2.33 involuntary battles to the death per season of Star Trek!) Ranged against kirk, Spock, Lincoln, and Surak are Genghis Khan and three fictional evil dudes (though one is a dudette). When Kirk objects and refuses to fight, the rock alien threatens the Enterprise with destruction unless they play along.

In the opening fist fight before the factions retreat to build weapons, Spock once again gets to fight the girl. Given time to discuss and plan, Lincoln argues they should fight dirty, citing his experience as a wartime President and arguing that anything goes as long as good wins. Surak argues otherwise and wants to go talk peace with the evil guys, insisting it is the only way. When he inevitably gets captured, Lincoln bravely goes to the rescue. When he inevitably gets captured, Kirk and Spock bravely go to the rescue. Lincoln warns them it’s a trap before getting a spear in the back, then Kirk and Spock duke it out one last time, managing to kill the evil leader, which causes the other three to flee. The rock alien pronounces judgement, saying that there’s no difference between good and evil as far as it can see. Kirk points out that they were fighting to save their comrades, while the baddies were fighting for power. The rock alien dismisses them, apparently learning nothing at all from its experiment.

The ending is really rushed and pointless, which seems wrong given the padding at the front of the episode. They could have restructured it to make it hold together better, but there’s probably not much point as it’s pretty uninspiring stuff that smells like reheated plots from a half-dozen other episodes.

Tropes: Two Of Your Earth Minutes, Famous, Famous, Fictional, Sufficiently Advanced Alien, Starfish Aliens, Blue And Orange Morality, Involuntary Battle To The Death, Archived Army, Would Hit A Girl, Reluctant Warrior, Actual Pacifist, Good Cannot Comprehend Evil, Voice Changeling, Dirty Coward.
Body count: Surak, Abraham Lincoln (both killed by the evil guys).

“The Cloud Minders” is another anvilicious episode along the lines of “Let That be Your Last Battlefield”. The moral here is again anti-prejudice and discrimination, played out between an elite ruling class and a lowly working class. Literally lowly, in an almost painful piece of symbolism, as the rulers live in the beautiful cloud city of Stratos, while the workers (called Troglytes) toil in the mines on the surface of the planet Ardana.

The Enterprise is there to collect supplies of the mineral zenite, which is the only cure for a plague threatening to wipe out all vegetation on some other planet. Kirk and Spock ignore the Ardanian request to beam down to their clod city, and instead go to the mines, where they are attacked by disgruntled Troglytes led by Vanna, who Spock gets to fight in a rare case of the crew fighting hand to hand with a woman. The High Advisor of Ardana, Plasus, rescues Kirk and Spock with a security team and takes them up to the safety of the city, which is all crystal spires and togas, setting up the urban segregation of this crapsaccharine world.

Here they meet Plasus’ daughter, Droxine, who wears a startlingly revealing light blue outfit that has Spock going google-eyed in a most out-of-character way, complete with some cringeworthy flirting dialogue. There’s some revelation of the plight of the Troglytes and bigoted dismissal of concern by Plasus, leading to a persecuted Troglyte jumping off the city and plummeting to his death. Spock goes all introspective, weighing up the beauty of Droxine against the ugliness of the society she inhabits. There’s even a Gilligan cut of Plasus assuring Kirk there is no violence in their society, followed by a shot of him torturing a captured Troglyte.

There’s a subplot about the Troglytes being exposed to an intelligence reducing gas from the zenite mines, which is part of the justification the cloud dwellers use for persecuting them. Kirk deals with Vanna, offering her gas masks to allow the Troglytes to grow to their full potential. Plasus is naturally opposed and there’s a standoff in the mines and all the drama and action basically happens crammed into the last 5 minutes of the episode, where it feels very rushed. Phew…

It’s a pretty lame episode. The moral is worthy, but it’s heavy-handed, and developed in annoying ways. Spock’s character is almost completely subverted as he basically turns into a lovestruck moron. Kirk interferes with a Federation member’s government with impunity. The plot idea is actually kind of good, but it’s not treated right.

Tropes: Anvilicious, Unobtainium, The Plague, Would Hit A Girl, Crystal Spires And Togas, Urban Segregation, Crapsaccharine World, The President’s Daughter, Theiss Titillation Theory, Character Derailment, Gilligan Cut, Agony Beam, Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right.
Body count: One Troglyte (suicide by jumping from Stratos).

“The Way to Eden“… and so we move from one of the best episodes of season 3 to one of the worst. It has space hippies and six, count them… six groovy musical numbers, including Spock playing along while the hippies and Enterprise crew dance.

The hippies arrive on the Enterprise after being rescued from a stolen ship. They are seeking the mythical paradise planet of Eden, and behave in a very 1960s anti-authoritarian way, including some far out slang. Spock, weirdly enough, is the only crew member who gets along with them, as we see his spiritual side and curiosity come out. He also pulls out a Vulcan harp to jam with the hippies and their wacky musical instruments. During one of the musical numbers, we see Sulu on the bridge tapping his toes and grooving to the rhythms, implying that they are broadcasting them throughout the ship for no apparent reason.

The story, as far as it goes, is that the leader of the hippies (though he refuses to be called a leader, saying that they are all equals) is the previously respected Dr Sevrin, a former professor of acoustics, who has rejected civilisation and wishes to find Eden where they can all live in harmony. McCoy finds in a medical examination that Sevrin is a carrier of a fatal infectious disease, which Sevrin denies exists in a deniariffic act of denying denial. McCoy wants to isolate Sevrin lest he infect his followers or anyone else he comes into contact with, which upsets the hippies. (While confined, we even see the brig guard toe-tapping to the piped music from the hippie/Spock jam session.) One of the hippies is an old flame of Chekov’s and there’s a minor subplot about how they don’t understand one another any more.

Of course, Sevrin escapes and the hippies take over the ship from auxiliary control, disabling the main bridge with ridiculous ease. Sevrin uses a sonic attack to cripple any resistance and takes the ship on a wild ride through the Galaxy until they find a planet that he claims is Eden. How he knows this is anyone’s guess. The hippies steal a shuttlecraft and go down to the planet, which looks nice enough when Kirk and Spock go down to chase them. There is a comment about Sulu being interested in botany – the first we hear about that since way back in season 1. But the beautiful vegetation is acidic and poisonous, and the hippie Adam and then Sevrin die after eating some of the fruit. Eden is an illusion, and the remaining hippies are left to find their own way again.

Wow, it’s just a horrible episode. The hippies are straight out of the 60s, just dressed in wacky space clothes variants of hippie garb. The musical numbers are obvious filler. The Enterprise operational procedures and security make no sense whatsoever. Kill me now!!

Tropes: Musical Episode, Pleasure Planet, Future Slang, Xenophone, Cult Colony, Typhoid Mary, Science Is Bad, Selective Obliviousness, New Old Flame, Cardboard Prison, Brown Note, Poison Is Corrosive, Death World, Reactionary Fantasy, No New Fashions In The Future, Filler.
Body count: Adam, Dr Sevrin (both from eating poisonous fruit).