Captain's Blog pt. 30: The Undiscovered Country

Nick Meyer's original choice of title for Star Trek II was The Undiscovered Country. Given that film's themes of friendship, age, and death, the reference to Hamlet makes perfect sense. As Hamlet questions whether or not life is worthwhile given its hardships, coming to the conclusion that people endure only out of a fear of death, (that undiscovered country whence no traveler has ever returned * ) its parallels to Captain Kirk's character arc are perfectly clear.

* Well, except Spock.

 
I can understand the studio's insisting it be changed: The Wrath of Khan has more immediate impact. Meyer acquiesced, but unhappily, so when he was approached by Nimoy to do a story about "the Berlin Wall coming down in space," he said Sounds great; I have the perfect title.

Except that's the first (though not the foremost) problem with TUC; the title makes only the vaguest sense when transposed on the story we actually get. Suddenly, Hamlet's soliloquy is interpreted as "the uncertain future?" i.e. the future of Klingons and the Federation / Trek itself is "the undiscovered country?" I mean, first of all, it was actually fairly well-discovered territory in 1991; we were all watching it every Saturday or Sunday on The Next Generation. I know Kirk and the gang don't know that in the timeline of the movie, but it still repeats the mistake of STV: The Final Frontier, i.e. only by the loosest stretch of the definition did the story involve an actual "final frontier." (It made sense for the original script but not so much for the film it ended up as.) Part VI could just as well be called Star Trek: It's Like About 1991 America and Stuff.

This title mismatch is emblematic of all that is wrong with TUC: this is a movie that overflows with incongruent details not fatal in and of themselves, but a nick here and a nick there and pretty soon you're bleeding to death. Or, as the Klingons put it before they switched to all-Shakespeare, a thousand throats can be cut by one running man.

For years I've been hearing from people who love this movie and have no time for any of the following. To each his or her own, of course, but keeping this sum-is-greater-than-its-parts/ cumulative-effect in mind, let's look at just a few of the many changed premises Meyer and co. bring to the table.

Since when do phasers leave exit wounds? Cool effect, bro and everything, but it is at odds with everything we've ever seen. While I'm here, is it at all believable this Klingon crew could be so confused and helpless in a failure-of-gravity situation? They act not only like this has never happened before but like they've never even considered it happening before.

 

 

 

Text by Michael Okuda. (His text-commentaries on the Trek films/ some episodes are always entertaining)

The entire sequence from the fake photon blast through the Daft Punk robots (thanks to Jeff B, for that) through McCoy's conveniently-botched examination through the trial (where people use 1940s-style transistor-translators and Chang channels Adlai Stevenson, for some reason) just rings false.

Then again, speaking only in other people's catchphrases seems to be all that Chang does. He's the Klingon equivalent of the alien from Explorers, apparently.

The Klingons were of course meant to represent the crumbling Soviet Empire, but the metaphor wags the tail a bit too much to be at all believable. TUC seems more dated than TOS, in so many ways.

The Federation comes across even less convincingly. I'll get to the film's biggest problem (i.e. our heroes and Starfleet are both inexplicably and incredibly racist) more in a little bit, but beyond that:

Apparently, it was meant for the Federation President to be blind, (which actually is a wink-wink detail I enjoy) hence this scene where he pointedly puts on his purple-tinted shades. They probably should have mentioned that in the dialogue itself. Or, better yet, cut it out altogether.

Or have him not be obviously sighted in every other scene. (Incidentally, this whole break to the Federation's p.o.v. is such a tonal break in the film)

Also, are we really to believe that Starfleet conducts its business in a 18th century French drawing room?

Or uses 1960s classroom fold-over maps to pitch a military operation? ("Operation: Retrieve," no less.)

I don’t want to make Nick Meyer the bad guy here. Really, he did everyone a favor by coming on board and steering the production to something resembling a credible destination. As Nimoy said of The Final Frontier, "(Bill) was just riding a bad script." So, too, was Nick, here, except he was riding five or six bad scripts all at once, cobbled together with little sense. (That story's too involved to reproduce here, but suffice it to say, script negotiations started in good faith and ended in chaos and arbitration. Nimoy, Meyer, and Shatner all discuss it at great length in their respective memoirs.)

But it's difficult not to see Nick Meyer as the "running man" from the Klingon proverb above in his determination to turn the film into a relentless hodge-podge of anachronistic cultural allusions completely at odds with all previously-established Trekverse rules. Whereas his Hornblower allusions were kept in check in TWOK, here he gives them not just free reign (At one point, Kirk tells the helm "Right Full Rudder." Are you serious?) but diplomatic immunity.

Not to mention his penchant for all-things-Holmes. I like Holmes (and Hornblower) as much as the next guy, and for the record, I'm fine with Spock mentioning an ancestor of his originated the famous Sherlock Holmes quote "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." (Meyer maintains it was meant to indicate Spock's relation to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his mother. Fine, whatever.) But I can think of few scenarios less applicable to that quote than the "mystery" sequence in the middle of the film, which is at odds with everything we ever learned about a starship, or tricorders or internal sensors for that matter, and where characters enter and exit like dinner theater, and bad dinner theater at that:

 

 

 

 

By the by, Meyer and JJ Abrams' Dad are friends, and Meyer gave a young JJ an annotated copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes at JJ's bar mitzvah.

I am fine with adding a galley and laundromat to the Enterprise; maybe they went retro at the last refit. I'm fine with adding some new Starfleet rule regarding the discharge of a phaser aboard a starship; it makes no sense/ is contradicted in dozens of previous episodes and movies, but hey, bureaucrats. I'm fine with a one-time "we've got to turn out every locker and mattress as if we were on a submarine" sequence; it makes no sense to go about things this way but hey, okay. (Likewise, I'm fine with the old "Uhh, listen up, everyone, would the killers, like, report to Sick Bay?" trick.) I'm fine with Chekov being made to look like a buffoon just to have a "if the shoe fits..." joke; maybe he's having a mental health day.

Ditto for Scotty, who once again is played mainly for comic relief.

But put all these things together? No. That's several bridges too far. That's an archipelago of bad and lazy writing.

Incidentally, despite the way it's pronounced, the word "inalienable" means in-a-lien-able. Which makes the whole business of "if you could only hear how bigoted you sound," not to mention some of the discussion around the topic, somewhat confused. It might have worked as a moment of translation/ communication difficulty had I gotten the impression the screenwriters understood the word's actual meaning.

And ditto for this "Let's pull out old 19th-century-looking Klingon translation dictionaries" sequence.  Nichelle Nichols objected to this scene, stating (quite correctly) that Uhura would have at least a passing familiarity with Klingon, but Meyer (rather bluntly, according to Nichols) overruled her. (Chekov can he heard saying something about how a universal translator would be recognized, but the whole thing rests on the strange premise that these ships cannot scan one another. Before we even get to the wtf-ness of this "quick! Pretend we're Klingons!" sentry-password stuff, there's that.)

Nichelle Nichols does a good job with the humor of this scene, but the idea of making all of the senior officers look like grandparents trying to "figure out this Tumblr thing" is at best a bad idea and at worst needlessly - and illogically - cutesy.

Maybe spell-check your character names, too? It's Uhura, not Uhuru. Then again, Kirk got it wrong a few times in TOS, as well:

"What's happening to Lieutenant Yoo-hoo-roo!?"

I'm usually pretty forgiving of this we're-really-commenting-on-ourselves aspect of Trek. As a rule, I shrug off a lot of stuff; if we could perfectly detail life in the twenty-third century and beyond, we'd be living in the twenty-third century and beyond. I get it - everything we write is, ultimately, the eye describing only itself. No problem. But The Undiscovered Country is a good exception to this rule: I'm perfectly happy to be forgiving of these things if the story in question doesn't hold the metaphor in such contempt. This couldn't be anything else but 20th (and in some cases, 18th and 19th) century baby boomers winking at themselves and masquerading as Trek. (If I had the time, I'd do a video mash-up of TUC to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" to really drive this point home.)

The "Only Nixon could go to China" line would actually be pretty good if everything else in the movie wasn't there. I like that Spock is trying to make a joke - and a pretty good one. Unfortunately, it's so tonally at odds with the scene that surrounds it (and everything else that happens) that it falls flat.

There are many more examples; to list them all would be overkill. Any one of them can be explained away with a little thought, but the cumulative effect is insurmountable for me. There's a difference between nitpicking and accounting, for Crissakes. One last one: the final starship battle rests on "this ship has got to have a tailpipe," a strange reference for someone of Uhura's era to make, and modifying an actual torpedo, not a photon torpedo, as it is called again and again. It might as well be a "magic cannonball."

Granted, this torpedo business is confused in many iterations of Trek, not just TUC.

Let's turn our attention to the bigotry and false-flag-ness of the whole Starfleet plot. Suddenly, Starfleet is racist and ignorant, displaying an understanding of the Klingons out of the 1930s.

Shatner (quite rightly) considered his "let them die" comment to be very un-Kirk-like. Meyer insisted. As a compromise, he did the scene in one take and added a dismissive wave after his comment which was subsequently edited out of the final movie despite Meyer's promise to leave it in. Considering Shatner only said the line contingent on the gesture/ shrug to explain it, this is pretty inconsiderate on Meyer's part.

Nichelle Nichols flat-out refused to say the racist lines attributed to Uhura (the lines were redistributed to the two jock-bigot transporter room folks we see after the Klingons beam in.) Koenig tried the same, but he finally relented, delivering the somewhat-humorous-if-odd-for-Chekov-to-reference "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" line.

Brock Peters' scene in the council chamber had to be shot in numerous takes, as he was very uncomfortable with the racial undertones in his lines that the Federation take the opportunity to "bring them to their knees" which was itself a reference to another film in which that line was said about African Americans. (i.e. The Birth of a Nation.)

The whole idea of turning Brock Peters and top Starfleet brass into bigots and false-flag-operatives is yet another shortcut-to-plotting/ lazy writing, to begin with. Compare how this comes across vs. the considerably better-handled false flags/ crew-stands-up-to-conspiracies of Into Darkness or Insurrection.

Would Starfleet seek to exploit another culture's tragedy and conspire to commit murder and blame it on others to further its own military ends and use racism/ xenophobia as cover for it? Not the Starfleet I know, but these are certainly questions worth considering and I'm glad Trek is asking them. They would be much more relevant, though, if the script didn't undermine and contradict itself (and all previous Trek) as it poses them. When Gorkon's daughter tells Kirk "You've restored my father's faith," and Kirk answers with "You've restored my son's," it's especially grating, given the backflips Kirk's characterization had to do to get to this "breakthrough" moment. Granted, these Klingon bastards killed his son, and granted Kirk's principles are somewhat "flexible" in TOS. But still:

“All things being equal, but things are not equal.”

Not just the actual conspiracy plot, but Worf's grandfather's speech in the Klingon kangaroo court in particular.

Meyer, to his credit, regrets having Spock torture Valeris to get the info, nowadays. One can argue that it's logical for Spock to do so, and I can see that, somewhat. But given the abundance of mixed messages surrounding it, it seems as odd a bit of characterization as everything else in the film.

 

It's supposed to end on a hopeful note, but the whole thing is a war of attrition to get there.

All of these problems notwithstanding, TUC remains a curiously well-regarded Trek film. There are certainly things I like about it, but they're so minor and few and far between:

 

The 2nd unit stuff sounds like it was especially difficult to film, but the visuals are undoubtedly cool.

Sulu is handled well.

His long overdue Captaincy of the Excelsior is good to see, as well as his unhesitant going off-grid when he realizes something rotten is going on.

Valeris is more or less fine. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense for her to be in on the conspiracy; maybe if they'd intended her to be the fall guy? (Fall girl, I guess.) It's better than the original idea of having Saavik turn traitor. (They only changed Saavik to Valeris when Kim Cattrall balked at being the third actress to play the role; sadly, Robin Curtis wasn't even asked.)

The scenes in the prison camp are all kind of fun.

Although this "Kissing yourself must have been your lifelong ambition" thing makes little sense as a line spoken between Kirk and the shapeshifter. Like the Nixon and China thing, had the rest of the script not existed, it'd be fine, but taken as part of the tsunami of wink-wink and anachronistic lines and moments, just... ugh. To paraphrase Joss Whedon re: Waterworld, "The problem with the third act is the first two acts."

 

 

Is this the stuff of David Bowie's nightmares? Or perhaps his fondest dreams?

I've detailed here and there how Roddenberry's declining health and presence of mind dovetailed with the last few Trek films and the beginning of TNG. After a particularly intense stroke, he was confined to a wheelchair and unable to say much beyond yes or no. Susan Sackett relays in her memoir how he was wheeled into a screening of this film. While the assembled suits (for whom the screening had primarily been arranged) talked to themselves about how great everything looked, Roddenberry, limited in speech but having one of his more lucid days, could only whisper "No... no... no..." over and over again.

I'm sorry, but a) that is so incredibly sad, and b) could this possibly bring Captain Pike from "The Menagerie" to mind any more?

 
Once he recovered his energy and vocabulary, Gene instructed his lawyer to do everything possible to shut the movie down, as it had taken the "Starfleet is military" trope to new and dangerously offensive heights. He died shortly after, and the lawsuit fizzled out. TUC raked in just under $75 million at the box office, and the original cast never appeared together again on the silver screen.

Given how they are handled here, that is probably a good thing. I personally prefer to think of The Voyage Home as the original cast's collective swan song. I've never read a satisfactory explanation as to why Meyer went about things the way he did with this movie; he seems to shrug off all criticism of it in his memoir (though less so in interviews on YouTube.)

For me, and with apologies to those who champion it, it's the first thing I think of whenever I hear or read people say "(fill in the blank) doesn't get Star Trek." Take the worst episodes of every Trek series, and they all seem more Trek-like than what we get here. It's hardly the worst thing in the world, but it's definitely my least favorite of the bigscreen Treks.