Captain's Blog pt. 43: Ten Treks That Never Happened

FROM THE BULLPEN: I started transcribing this post over five months ago, when my baby daughter was still en-wombed. As it simply consists of info transcribed from various source materials and not much in the ways of analysis, I just added a little bit to it at a time. Can't believe it's been five months and all these Trek-blogs later.

My work on this phase of the Captain's Log is more or less finished. There'll be a guest post (or posts) covering Deep Space Nine by my brother and his wife, and a back-and-forth on the Power Records with Into the Dark Dimension blogger Jeff B and maybe a wrap-up best-of/ Fiesta Bowl sort of post, but besides that, there remains only TOS posts, which I think I will group together under a different moniker. (Don't have one yet, so feel free to leave suggestions for such in the comments.)

Which is not to say any of the above (or the below) is incidental! Far from it. Thanks for coming all this way with me and hope you enjoy what remains. And without further ado, let's turn things over to:

I am the Guardian of Forever. I am my own beginning, my own ending. Behold! A gateway into ten Star Treks that never came to pass...

1. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (by Gene Roddenberry)

Around-about 1975, Paramount told Roddenberry to come up with a story for a big-screen Trek. His first attempt has become known as The God Thing, although no bona fide completed version ever materialized.

"Somewhere out there, there's this massive entity, this abstract, unknown life force that seems mechanical in nature, although it actually possesses its own highly advanced consciousness. It's a force thousands of times greater than anything intergalactic civilization has ever witnessed. It could be God, it could be Satan, and it's heading towards Earth. It demands worship and assistance, and it's also in a highly volatile state of disrepair.

"The original crew of the Enterprise have been embraced as heroes all over the galaxy. Spock has gone back to Vulcan to head their Science Academy. McCoy's married and living on a farm. Everyone else has been given hefty promotions and continues to serve on active duty. Starfleet has offered Kirk a prestigious but deskbound Admiralty, but he's passed, preferring to retain his rank as captain while acting as a sort of consultant / troubleshooter aboard Federation spacecraft. As we find him, he's visiting the recently overhauled Enterprise, supervising her new captain, Pavel Chekhov.

"Kirk rounds up the old crew while studying and battling this "God thing." We finally approach the craft, and the alien presence manifests itself on the Enterprise in the form of a humanoid probe, which quickly begins shape-shifting while preaching about having traveled to Earth many times, always in a noble effort to law down the law of the cosmos. Its final image is that of Jesus Christ.

"'You must help me!' the probe repeats, now bleeding from hands, feet, and forehead. Kirk refuses, at which point the probe begins exhausting the last of its energy in a last-ditch violent rampage. It summons up the last of its remaining strength to blast Sulu, severing his legs in the process. When Spock attempts to comfort him, he, too, is blasted and left for dead. With that expenditure of energy, the vessel is weakened to the point of vulnerability, and the Enterprise unleashes a barrage of firepower that destroys the craft.

"With that, we begin pondering the notion that perhaps humanity has finally evolved to the point where it's outgrown its need for gods, competent to account for its own behavior, without the religiously imposed concepts of fear, guilt, and divine intervention."

Can't just one of these God-returns stories be about Kali?

I'm not sure if the story Roddenberry describes justifies these conclusions at the end, but it is of course only a treatment. Many of its rough edges were smoothed into what became The Motion Picture, a picture I very much enjoy, so, really, this does exactly what a treatment should do: point the way towards a worthwhile destination and establish some method of getting there.

Paramount passed, somewhat understandably, but the idea for a movie remained hot, so Roddenberry approached Jon Povill to take a crack at it.

2. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (by Jon Povill)

"Our tale begins by finding the Enterprise and her entire crew dead, the victims of an imploding black hole. Suddenly, however, they're mysteriously reanimated, repaired by some sort of glowing intergalactic goo. What follows is a wildly complicated tale involving repeated time travel, heated arguments with Einstein, Hitler, Churchill, and Mao, clandestine meetings with JFK, and culminating with the Enterprise ultimately being responsible for the start of World War Two."

This idea was met with even less enthusiasm than Roddenberry's original one, but Paramount still wanted to do a bigscreen Trek, so they tried again.

3. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (by Chris Bryant and Alan Scott)

Note: Not this Alan Scott

"Planet of the Titans opens with the Enterprise hurtling through space to answer the distress call of a fellow Federation ship.

"Upon arrival, however, there is nothing to be found. The Enterprise has been duped. Strange energy waves blast across the bridge, searing Kirk's brain in the process. Althoguh the captain initially appears to have escaped injury, he slowly goes mad, eventually hijacking a shuttlecraft and blasting towards what seems to be an invisible planet. When rescue efforts fail, Spock - logically presuming the Captain to be dead although intuition tells him his friend has indeed survived - moves on.

"Three years later, Spock journeys back to the invisible planet and discovers it was once home to the Titans, an ancient, once-believed-mythical race of supremely intelligent and advanced humanoid creatures. Beaming down to the surface, Spock becomes convinced he's also closing in on Kirk. At the same time, his preliminary studies of the planet are horrifying, revealing that it will soon become engulfed by an enormous black hole.

"Meanwhile, a Klingon Bird of Prey has intercepted communications that detail the findings and is now speeding towards the Planet of the Titans, intent upon pillaging the vast intelligence and resources of the super-race. Spock ultimately finds his captain alive and well upon the surface of the planet. Kirk explains that the planet is not inhabited by the Titans at all but by the vicious and brutish Cygnians. They mindlessly destroyed the Titans long ago but were far too primitive to reap the rewards of their teachings. Very soon, the Cygnians decide the crew of the Enterprise must meet the same fate.

"What follows is a three-way battle against time, with the crew of the Enterprise trying to salvage the surviving riches of the Titans while simultaneously surviving attacks from the Cygnians and the Klingons. In the end, with no way out, Kirk orders the Enterprise through the Black Hole. Everyone else is destroyed, and the Planet of the Titans implodes."

At this point, Paramount, aggravated with the rising cost of development in absence of a script they liked, downgraded the project from big screen outing to small screen ongoing series, one they hoped would be the flagship of its own to-be-launched television network. That story with its many twists and turns and starts and stops is the subject of this book.

Eventually, in the wake of the mega-success of Star Wars, the show/ network idea was scrapped, and Paramount resurrected the idea of a motion picture. Back to the drawing board. Enter Harlan Ellison.

4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (by Harlan Ellison)

No written treatment exists for Ellison's idea - he pitched it in monologue to an assembly of Paramount execs - but as pieced together from various sources:

"The story starts on Earth where strange phenomena is inexplicably occurring. In India, a building where a family is having dinner vanishes into dust. In the U.S., one of the Great Lakes suddenly vanishes, wreaking havoc. In a public square, a woman suddenly screams and falls to the pavement where she turns into some kind of reptilian creature. The truth is suppressed, but the Federation realizes that someone or something is tampering with time and changing things on Earth in the far distant past. What is actually happening involves an alien race on the other end of the galaxy. Eons ago, Earth and this planet both developed races of intelligent humanoid reptiles as well as humans. On Earth, the humans destroyed the reptile men and flourished. In the time of the Enterprise, when this race learns what happened on Earth in the remote past, they decide to change things so that they will have a kindred planet.

"For whatever reason, the Federation decides only the Enterprise and her crew are qualified for this mission, so a mysterious figure goes around kidnapping the old central crew. This figure is finally revealed to be Kirk. After they are reunited, they prepare for the mission into the past to save Earth.

"The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. (The story) spans all of time, all of space, with a potent moral and ethical problem."

Legend has it that after Harlan's pitch, some suit suggested putting the Mayans in there somewhere, an idea Harlan found offensive. Harsh words ensued, and Harlan stormed out. No lizard-men Star Trek.

Much to David Icke's disappointment, one imagines.

As with Roddenberry's original pitch, it's unfair to evaluate the merits of the story based on this alone, but the idea has a lot of problems. I'm not sure if there's actually a compelling ethical dilemma at the heart of it, for one. When an alien species invades your past (for very unconvincing reasons - it wants a kindred planet? That's it? From across the galaxy?) to wipe out your race, you're not really at a moral crossroads. I suppose discovering that your distant ancestors once committed genocide against intelligent reptilians is somewhat disturbing, but... what are you supposed to do? Sit back and allow it to happen? Condemn the future to oblivion to play missionary/ politically-correct with the distant past? 

But: it probably would've been tightened up in revision.

Speaking of Ellison, his original script for "City on the Edge of Forever" is quite a bit different than the TV episode it became. It's available as a book (and probably for free out there on the internet - I haven't looked) with an introductory essay from Ellison that blasts everyone from Roddenberry to Shatner to Joan Collins, and ending essays from David Gerrold, Walter Koenig, Peter David and others.  

Without getting a list of all the differences, the TV version is immeasurably better. It is to the TV version what Roddenberry's original pitch for TMP is to the finished version of The Motion Picture. Characters and concepts from Ellison's original are compartmentalized to much greater effect in the finished version. Count me on the side of the Genes and D.C. Fontana on this one.

5. Star Trek II (by Harve Bennett, Mike Minor, Sam Peeples, and Jack Sowards)

Harve Bennett started off his tenure as Trek's cinematic overseer with an idea to bring Khan back and to provide Nimoy with a great death scene for Spock. But things went through quite a few revolutions before Nicholas Meyer corralled all ideas into one workable script that met with approval from all quarters. The first attempts centered around the following:

"Khan rallies the youth of the entire galaxy (!!!) into a full-blown revolution against the Federation. In a no-holds barred quest for revenge, Khan frames Kirk as the intergalactic equivalent of Public Enemy Number One. Kirk gains a full-grown son named David (who is involved in Khan's rebellion against him/ the old guard) and romances a beautiful redheaded fellow officer named O'Rourke. (Later, O'Rourke is changed to a young female Vulcan named Saavik, and the steamy romance transferred to David.) Khan seeks control of the Genesis Device, a powerful technology capable of terraforming a planet in mere minutes. At the end, Khan and Kirk fight on a lava-planet with sword/ whips that can take the shape of a variety of stupid things."

Sensing that something was not coming together correctly, Bennett had sci-fi vet Sam Peeples take a crack at it. Peeples jettisoned all but the Genesis Device and kept that only as a minor subplot "amid a rather strange storyline focusing on a formless and unfathomable pair of villains from another dimension."

At that point, Meyer took the best points of the above and hammered out what he titled The Undiscovered Country. This was changed to The Vengeance of Khan and then to The Wrath of Khan, under which moniker it entered the world and cinematic history.

Cool Mondo poster for Khan.

6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Leonard Nimoy, Harve Bennett, and Nicholas Meyer)

Although much of what was originally devised for The Voyage Home made it onto the screen, a significant portion of the story had to be reworked when Eddie Murphy passed on the project:

"Eddie Murphy was to play a rather eccentric college professor, one who firmly believed in the existence of extra-terrestrials, ghosts, ESP and the like. After a series of embarrassing and very public false alarms, Murphy's job would have been hanging by a thread. And at that point, he and some of his students (not nearly so open-minded on these topics) would have gone to the Super Bowl.

"Occupying the worst seats in the house on a typically foggy San Francisco afternoon, Murphy's professor character would've been enduring the game's stereotypically overblown halftime show when he would've become one of sixty thousand witnesses to the first appearance of a Klingon Bird of Prey in the twentieth century. He would be the only one to believe it was real.

"Later, when Murphy was alone in his classroom, listening to a series of recorded whale songs, the Klingon ship's computers would lock on to the sound, and shortly thereafter, Murphy would have found Kirk, Spock and company beaming into his classroom, asking questions, bidding him good day, and ultimately high-tailing it away from their wide-eyed observer. Many plot-twisting scenes and about three centuries later, Murphy would have been in full Starfleet regalia, having joined the force, and saluting his new friends."

Alas, the Eddie Murphy Trek was not meant to be. He went to do The Golden Child and his part was reworked for Gillian Anderson. (*EDIT: Not really Gillian Anderson.)

Additionally, George Takei was meant to have a scene where he meets his great-great-grandfather on the street, but the child actor hired to play the role was unable to perform. (I remember reading the novelization of this movie and coming across this scene and wondering, in those pre-internet/ deleted-scenes/ commentary-track days, whose bright idea it was to cut such a cool little scene.)

7. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (by William Shatner)

Is it possible that this movie started off as kind of a cool idea? Let's find out:

"Zar, a holy man driven by a genuine belief that God was speaking to him demanding he accumulate as many followers as possible and provide a suitable vehicle with which he might better spread his ideas through the universe.

"Spock surprises his shipmates by stating he knew the renegade holy man back in Vulcan seminary. (???) Surprise turns to shock when Spock makes it clear this man is so brilliant, so advanced, that he could genuinely be the Messiah.

"The crew of the Enterprise travels to Paradise City, battles with the forces of the holy man, and is ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer numbers within his command. In a last-ditch effort to regain control, Kirk sets a fatal trap for Zar but is thwarted by Spock, who warns the holy man of the danger. Kirk is furious, and he is not mollified when Spock explains his actions by stating that he now truly believes Zar to be the Messiah. Bones, too, becomes convinced, and they both tell Kirk that they cannot in good conscience allow any harm to come to the man. 

"Upon arrival at God's homeworld, they meet The Man. God is surrounded by a host of angels with flaming swords. They argue. The image begins to transform, ultimately becoming unmistakably satanic. The angels change into hordes of gargoyles, the Furies of Hell.

"Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, still suffering the effects of their first adversarial relationship, each run in a different direction. McCoy falls and breaks his leg and is surrounded by the Furies, as is Spock. Kirk is able to escape but risks his life to return and help his friends. Descending into the river Styx, they fight off the hideous attacks and eventually make their escape."

Well... I think adding the Furies/ angels business might have been kind of cool, and at least there's a point to the character tension between our trinity of heroes. But it still runs into the same problem the final product / Roddenberry's "God Thing" does: these ideas of God/ Satan are terribly limited to only one specific culture on Earth and therefore hardly compelling material for a universal-theology sort of story. The Motion Picture succeeds by positioning "the God Thing" the way it does via V'ger; here we get... I don't know, some lamer version of Q/ the Squire of Gothos. 

But as the failings of The Final Frontier are well-known, let's move on.

8. Starfleet Academy / The Academy Years (by Harve Bennett)

After the 2009 Star Trek came out, Harve Bennett made some waves by telling convention audiences they ripped off his idea for Starfleet Academy/ The Academy Years, the film he wanted to do after The Final Frontier:

"The last thing I did at Paramount before I left was a prequel. It was the best script of all and it never got produced. Ned Tanen, who was Paramount’s head of production, had green lighted it before he left. We even had location scouts and sent feelers out for the cast. It was Kirk and Spock aged seventeen entering Starfleet Academy. Montgomery Scott would have been their Engineering instructor. Kirk falls in love for the only time in his life. The cadets save the world. The premise of the film was racial tension. Spock becomes the first green-blood to enter the Academy, which is a red-blooded organization, and he is discriminated against. And there was a planetary cabal against green-bloods and the cadets at the Academy are the ones that save the day. Kirk’s love is killed heroically saving the planet from the ship.  I had an eye on John Cusack for Spock, which would have been great. Ethan Hawke could have been Kirk. There were so many possibilities. But basically it was a love story and it was a story of cadets, teenagers. And, in order to get Shatner and Nimoy in, we had a wraparound in which Kirk comes back to address the academy and the story spins off of his memory. At the end, Kirk and Spock are reunited and they beam back up to Enterprise, which would have left a new series potential, the academy, and a potential other story with the original Trek cast. All the possibilities were open, the script was beautiful, and the love story was haunting, but it didn’t happen.

"And the first sequence of that movie was Jim Kirk in a crop duster bi-plane, stunting about while his brother and his mother are "Jim, you wild ass – set down!" And he finally ends up crashing into a haystack."

Harve goes on to say it's this last bit that convinced him that Abrams et al. ripped off his script, changing the bi-plane to a "futuristic motorcycle thing." 

Which of course belongs to the policeman chasing Kirk, not Kirk himself, but don't tell Harve.

It actually came very close to being made, but Paramount's upper management - as it often did - changed hands, and the new studio heads did not want to celebrate the franchise's 25th anniversary without Shatner, Nimoy, and the gang reprising their roles.

Would it have worked? In 1991? Tough to tell. My instincts say no, but I have no doubt it would have been interesting. The racial tension story seems out of place to my eyes and ears, but it was developed well enough in Into Darkness. Which makes me wonder if Harve thinks that one, too, was drawn from his never-used script.

9. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (by Nicholas Meyer, Leonard Nimoy, Denny Martin Flinn, Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal)

  
Star Trek VI also went through many revisions before it congealed into the train wreck we know and love:

"As originally scripted, the film would've opened upon the USS Excelsior, under the command of Captain Sulu. From there, we would've found Kirk in bed, making love to yet another conquest. Not all that unusual, except for the fact that this woman is Carol Marcus, and as this  thing moves forward, you'd have gotten the distinct impression that these two had not only reconciled but were now well on their way to spending their autumnal years together while making love like newlyweds at every opportunity.

"However, when a knock on the door brings the news that the old crew of the Enterprise has been ordered to reassemble once more, Kirk risks his relationship and leaves Carol's embrace, finding even greater seduction in the opportunity for one last adventure. With that in mind, he sets out to round up the rest of his crew. Though Starfleet describes Spock's whereabouts as "highly confidential," Kirk would nonetheless locate the rest of the crew rather easily.

"He'd have found Scotty bored out of his mind to the point where he's now spending his days taking apart the Klingon Bird of Prey seen in Star Trek IV in a futile attempt to at last beat this damn horse to death uncover the secrets of her cloaking device. Uhura is next, equally bored, working for a Federation radio station as the host of a call-in advice program.

"Chekhov, too, is uneasy, yawning his days away at a chess club while repeatedly trying in vain to defeat higher life forms with special Russian strategies. Finally, Kirk finds McCoy most unhappy of all. Hailed as a conquering hero, Bones is nonetheless drunk and disorderly at a high-scoety medical dinner in his honor. Disgusted by the money-hungry (???) healers he's forced to endure in the civilian world, even the dependably cantankerous Bones jumps at the change to once again become useful aboard the Enterprise."

It really is remarkable how many of the Trek features' original scripts go through this "got to round up the crew, Magnificent Seven-style" business, only to cut it from the final draft. Moreover, it is suggested so repeatedly that the only excitement or fulfillment the crew ever has comes aboard the Enterprise and everything else is a pitiful substitute. Kind of a depressing idea!

10. Star Trek: Insurrection (by Michael Piller)

One paragraph from the introduction to Piller's memoir detailing the making of this movie covers many of the ideas developed and ultimately discarded:

"Would your movie be about the girl who broke our heo's heart and the best friend he's sent to kill, the rag-tag army of space mariners, the mysterious society of alien children, the trecherous Romulans, the Douglas-Fairbanks-esque Joss, who duels with Worf and lusts after Troi, the mutes who project illusions, the holographic stand-up comedian, the lecherous three hundred year old munchkin, the masked race of Generation X aliens, or Quark's trying to open a fountain of youth franchise amidst the Ba'ku? The Alamo stand-off? Heart of Darkness?"

When reading Piller's book, one is struck by his frequent callbacks to Hollywood's Golden Age: Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Jane Wyatt in Lost Horizon, or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., etc. I, too, love old movies, but his lack of contemporary reference points is interesting... I can see why Spiner and Burton felt he was so out of touch.

Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before. 

(All what-might-have-been plot summaries from William Shatner's Movie Memories, except for Harlan Ellison's from his book The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay that Became the Classic Star Trek Episode, and Fade-In: From Idea to Final Draft: The Making of Star Trek Insurrection by Michael Piller)

Captain's Blog pt. 29: The Final Frontier

At the end of the chapter on The Voyage Home in Shatner's Movie Memories, he writes, "A lifelong dream was about to be realized. I was going to direct a film. The crew of the Enterprise was about to meet God after taking a short detour through Hell..."

Easily among the most reviled projects of the entire Trek pantheon, The Final Frontier opened in the summer of 1989. After the mega-success of The Voyage Home, it underwhelmed at the box office. I don't know what the math is now, but the conventional wisdom at the time was a film had to make about $14 million over its budget to be considered successful. The Final Frontier cost $30 million, so its domestic gross of $52 million (with another $17 million overseas) made it a very modest success.

 

 

I'd love to tell you that it was unfairly panned or that subsequent re-watches have unearthed a hidden gem, but... I can't. It's still a pretty bad movie. I don't hate it the way I hate, say, the Black Eyed Peas or something, i.e. it doesn't invent a new way to suck/ for people to embarrass themselves, but it's still a lackluster effort at best.

Shatner started off with laudable intentions. The original story he set out to film rested on two pillars: fracturing the trinity/friendship of Spock, Kirk and McCoy along lines we've never seen them fractured before and then repairing them, and literalizing the very concept of God/ the devil in a whole new way: "Essentially, I was trying to say that while man conceives God in his own image, that image changes from generation to generation, allowing manmade gods, pretenders, their foothold. Since we'd come face to face with the devil, we could infer that God does exist, most tangibly and understandably, within the heart of man."

That's an admirable line of inquiry, but as Harve Bennett mentioned in Movie Memories, Shatner had first-director syndrome: the story was overwhelmed in "making everything huge," from the interpersonal conflicts to the theme to the production. As each got slowly whittled down to size (and then some,) it's interesting what changed/ what was created to accommodate:

1) Nimoy and Kelley refused to participate if their characters joined in with any cult/ quest that would require their betraying their oldest friend. At this point, the character of Sybok was created. Nimoy said the sudden appearance of a brother was lame. So, they decided to make it even lamer (but protect the continuity of Spock never having mentioned him before) by having him be a renegade half-brother from Sarek's previous marriage. No one was happy with the compromises, here, but it all came about as an attempt to assuage Nimoy's and Kelly's concerns. (Kelley's concern netted him the deathbed scene with his father, which comes off a bit better.)

 

 

2) The production didn't run smoothly (few productions do) so most of Shatner's elaborate camera moves and sequences were unable to be filmed. By the end of the shoot, shots that normally took hours to set up were given minutes. A lot of this had to do with first the writers' strike causing chaos with the script, and then a Teamsters' strike. (Which resulted in on-set sabotage: the trucks hired to ferry the cast and crew back and forth were "mysteriously" blown up in the middle of the desert.)

3) The quest to find God/ the devil/ the deity in the heart of man/ turns out to be just an alien or a malfunctioning computer, etc. = overused Trek trope at best, quagmire-of-predictable-failure at worst. As a concept, it is guaranteed to offend at least someone, which isn't always a bad thing; art should be provocative. But it was never something the studio was going to get behind. "Provocative" and "lighthearted franchise hit" are mutually exclusive. So while Shatner set off with the best of intentions, there really was no way he was going to be able to make 2001 or even The Motion Picture; at best, he'd end up with what he got, a severely Harrison-Bergeron-ed version of the original idea.

I feel kinda bad for him, but as Shatner's fictional-real-self says in Free Enterprise re: his idea to film "Julius Caesar" with himself playing all the parts: "It's the definition of hubris." Maybe it's better to shoot for the stars and fail then shoot for the lower stratosphere and fail, but a failure is a failure is a failure.

Added to all of the above, Industrial Light and Magic was either unavailable or too expensive, according to whom you believe, so a relatively untested private fx company (Applied Minds) was hired, and they failed to deliver usable fx, necessitating the deletion of most of the third act.

Originally, angels and demons were supposed to assault Kirk, but they were changed to more budget-conscious "rock men." Alas, the fx returned proved unworkable. (It all sounds a bit silly, but the rock-guys from Galaxy Quest looked pretty cool onscreen, so maybe it could've worked, had they a bit more money and time.)

As Nimoy says of the film/ his friend's directorial debut, "He was riding a bad script, and what was on the page was what we shot."

For more tidbits and trivia, click here. Personally, the best thing to come out of this film is this fan-made Shatner-on-the-Mount video:

Bless you, internet.

The film is not entirely bereft of things to like. It's fun to see Morgan Earp from "Spectre of the Gun" return to the screen:

The Klingons are perfunctory but not awful. And the destruction of Pioneer 10 is a nice wink at the whole V-Ger concept. (i.e. not all of our probes went out and mated with some cosmic force; some were just target practice for triggerhappy Klingons.)

The two actors (Todd Bryant and Spice Williams-Crosby) give a fun interview in the DVD Special Features. They appear to have had a fun time, at least, and are humble enough. They did the best they could with ultimately thankless parts.

Kirk's question "What does God need with a starship?" could be a meme of some kind - it's got the moxy but unfortunately not the context to make it relevant.

Spock nerve pinches a horse. I like that.

The Yosemite scenery is, of course, beautiful to look at, as are the attempts to recall a sort Albert Bierstadt vibe at the end.

Incidentally, it was supposed to be Mount Rushmore, with an additional face added, but this was dropped due to fx/ budget. I think it was meant to be a woman with African features, not Davy Crockett, as it looks like in this storyboard.

Sybok is not a bad character, but his quest/ takeover of the ship never makes a whole lot of sense. We're told over and over again why he believes what he does/ what drives him, but (and this isn't a knock on Laurence Luckinbill, who does a pretty good job for what it's worth) I never quite believe or understand.

 

 

Cynthia Gouw plays the Romulan ambassador to (ahem) Paradise City. (The G'n'R song was huge in the late 80s; no one involved thought this might be a bit distracting? It says something about how forgettable this movie is, actually, that no one's made a you-tube mash-up of it. There's a you-tube mash-up for practically every throwaway line or bad pun you could think of for Trek.) She's not particularly memorable or convincing as a Romulan, but she's had an interested post-Final Frontier career. As for the other ambassadors:

David Warner will return in The Undiscovered Country as well as TNG's "Chain of Command."

And Korrd (thankfully apostrophe-free) re-appears a few times as well. (I'm always amused at how many people Kirk runs into who were "required reading at the Academy.")

After Sybok takes the ship through the Great Barrier (more on that in a minute) there is a nice moment where Kirk assumes control and seems like Kirk. It's one of the few times anyone in the cast seems like his or her usual self.

Chekov and Sulu are particularly ill-used.

And Scotty acts like Groundskeeper Willie throughout. Much has been made of the "I know this ship like the back of my hand" business, but okay, cheap laugh, whatever. What's up with every other scene he's in, though?

And what is up with this sudden and inexplicable Scotty/ Uhura romance?

The less said about Uhura's fan dance, the better.

But it's truly a weird moment.

Incidentally, Nichelle Nichols refused to come back as Uhura unless they swore they'd get her out of those dress pants and back into a skirt. I wonder if that's what started the process that resulted in the fan-dance sequence, i.e. Gotta showcase the gams... Whatever the reasoning, I think we all just sort of pretend it didn't happen. As a "lure the bad guys out of position" thing, it's rather ridiculous.

Not to mention more than a little retrograde for the 23rd century.

Most of the humor of the film comes at the expense of the characters, though I do like the turbolift scene. Kirk: "I could use a shower."

Spock: (Beat.) "Yes."

There are many, many other gaffes (including the addition of a few dozen decks to the starship for the purpose of making the "fire the rockets!" climbing scene more dramatic, or something) but let's get to the two biggest remaining problems. I recall reading Roger Ebert's review at the time:

"There was a moment in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - only one, and a brief one, but a genuine one - when I felt the promise of awe. The Starship Enterprise was indeed going where no man had gone before, through the fabled Great Barrier, which represents the end of the finite universe. What would lie beyond? Would it be an endless void, or a black hole, or some kind of singularity of space and time that would turn the voyagers inside out and deposit them in another universe? Or would the Barrier even reveal, as one of the characters believes, the place where life began? The place called by the name of Eden and countless other words? As the Enterprise approached the Barrier, I found my attention gathering."

 

Alas, he was quickly disappointed, and it's when we get to the Barrier stuff that the film really falls apart:

"After you've seen the movie, ask yourself these questions: 1) How was it known that the voyagers would go beyond the Barrier; 2) what was the motivation behind what they found there; 3) how was it known that they would come to stand at exactly the point where the stone pillars came up from the Earth; 4) In a version of a question asked by Capt. Kirk, why would any entity capable of staging such a show need its own starship; and 5) is the Great Barrier indeed real, or simply a deceptive stage setting for what was found behind it? (What I'm really complaining about, I think, is that Star Trek V allows itself enormous latitude in the logic beneath its plot. If the Barrier is real, what exactly are we to make of the use to which it is put?)"

Additionally, they are 28,000 light years from the center of the galaxy at one point. At warp 8, that's 52 years. They make it in less than a day. Even with the deleted scenes of Sybok "modifying the engines," I mean, come on.

No mention is made of "Where No Man Has Gone Before," either; it was only the series' freaking pilot...

 

It is recalled, I suppose, in this one shot of a plaque in the observation lounge, equipped, as you can see, with an Age of Sail-era steering wheel.

And God, of course, turns out to be... what, exactly? Just an imprisoned alien? There's potential in such an idea, especially if it is the god or the devil of Earth/ Klingon/ Romulan/ Vulcan lore. But... we don't really find out, nor is the mystery ever satisfactorily exploited. Compare it to "Devil's Due" or "The Chase" from TNG, and you see ways the story could have gone that aren't even hinted at, here. Hell, even keeping the idea literal, i.e. Kirk fist-fights Jehovah, or Spock out-maneuvers Yahweh, there's a lunacy there I can get on board with. But what we get is far from exciting. Reheated Klingon drama and pointless character squabbling, and ending with one of the more unforgivable flubs in Trek continuity, i.e. Kirk's telling Spock he lost a brother once but lucky for him, he got him back.

RIP, George Samuel Kirk!

This was corrected in Peter David's adaptation of the film for DC. I don't mean to inflate the importance of Kirk's brother; he's barely ever mentioned again after he dies in TOS. But isn't there somebody on staff to correct this sort of thing? Then again, if Spock can forget he had a brother, maybe this was a result of Shatner's/ Nimoy's "favored nations" clause. (Hey, it's better than nothing)

AFTERMATH

If TMP is the series finale that we never got, STV: TFF is the bloated mash-up of "Way to Eden," "By Any other Name" and "This Side of Paradise" that we really never needed.

Gene Roddenberry (according to Susan Sackett) didn't participate much in the making of the film. "More than anything, it was the story that distressed him. His own script ("The God Thing") had been turned down by the studio years before, and he was still smarting from that rejection. He felt that Trek V did a much poorer job of portraying an encounter with God than his own story, that it was less imaginative, limited in scope and depth. (...) He found the raw footage so depressing that he stopped attending screenings."

(Also, 100% less nude-oil-wrestling.)

Harve Bennett blamed the film's failure partly on Trek fans not having to store up their appetites for the bigscreen adventures anymore; every week brought a new episode of TNG as well as blockbuster/ sequel fatigue: Lethal Weapon 2, Indy 3, Back to the Future 2, Ghostbusters 2, not to mention Batman, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and The Little Mermaid. It was a banner year for the box office, with each of the ten highest grossing films bringing in over 100 million, but I'm not sure I ultimately agree. It's true that an abundance of small-screen Trek might keep some people away from the movie theater, but Trek fans are a particularly ravenous lot. If The Final Frontier had been anywhere near as fun or as epic as the previous films in the franchise, I imagine it would have made even more money than The Voyage Home.

TFF was the last Trek film to be produced by Harve. It wasn't its lack of box office muscle that led to his departure, though, but the new head of Paramount's resistance to doing his "Starfleet Academy" script. I'm planning a "Trek That Never Was" sort of post somewhere down the line and will cover the plot of that therein. Paramount offered him a rather insulting contract, which he declined to sign. Harve Bennett, after four films and roughly $325 million at the box office, was out. Says he: "We all have a false sense in our worlds, no matter what they are, that by doing the things we are asked to do, by making successes, by making other people money, (that) we're going to be a permanent party in the world we live in. That didn't happen (...) and I encountered the crushing recognition that I'd been jobbed."

Can't help but feel badly for Harve, here. His Starfleet Academy idea was essentially what Paramount did in 2009, so in hindsight, he was 100% correct. Had it been done in lieu of The Undiscovered Country, one wonders how things would have played out. At any rate, things change, Harve was out, and the Trek franchise was momentarily without a head for its bigscreen adventures.

NEXT: Joyland, I swear! Maybe The Plant and Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, as well. Maybe even Duma Key, Redux! Then on to either TNG Season 5 or The Undiscovered Country.