I Have Been, and Always Shall Be, Your Critic: Rating the Star Trek Movies

When I started my run through the Star Trek movie franchise, I was curious to find out if I’d like these stories now more or less than I had in my earlier days. I loved the J.J. Abrams relaunch when I’d seen it in the movie theaters, but I kept hearing from various friends that I “didn’t understand” Star Trek, that if I was a Star Trek fan I wouldn’t like the movie. Well, I wasn’t, and I did, but I’m always willing to reconsider. (I’ve always found the “you don’t get it” argument curious, as if one’s opinion on a movie was dependent on the viewer having done homework prior to watching it. An audience will experience a movie in a variety of ways. Get on with it.) I explained my general indifference to all things Star Trek back at the start, so if you want a recap, go ahead and check it out.

My general reaction to the movies is slightly more positive than my initial viewings were all those years ago. I actively want to go back and watch The Original Series now, and I can’t say I ever felt that way before; before it was just something I figured I’d get to at some point some day, but now I want to watch them.

I still love the Abrams Trek, though, and if that means I can’t be a real Star Trek fan, well, I’m not gonna lose sleep over that. I don’t concern myself with your labels, The Man.

What follows is a ranking of the Star Trek movies. As always, I’m not big on lists, so while I’ve put them in order of preference, pay more attention to their grouping rather than their standing. That make sense? It’s going to have to, because I’m done explaining it.

FIVE STAR LEVEL

STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY – The best of the Star Trek movies, UNDISCOVERED deftly draws on the history of the movie franchise to give the original crew a fitting send-off. There’s real humor and real tension, and only one super-clunker of a scene (the ridiculous Kirk fights himself bit. Unlike the other pre-Abrams Trek films, UNDISCOVERED actually feels like a movie and not just a longer form TV episode.

STAR TREK – Abrams’ relaunch is a masterpiece of frenetic pacing where things just keep happening in order to stop you from thinking too much. I’m okay with that because it’s so darn entertaining. This is the only Star Trek movie that looks like it has an actual movie budget, and the only one other than THE VOYAGE HOME that seems designed simply to give you a good time. Big stakes, real tension, enjoyable moments … it all works wonderfully.

FOUR STAR LEVEL

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT – The second film to feature The Next Generation cast, FIRST CONTACT skillfully blends a trip back in time (why do Star Trek movies never go forward in time?) with the Borg. There’s two distinct plot lines and that gives the film a really nice balance between the more comical Earth-bound away team led by Riker and the Enterprise-bound team led by Picard. Some of the humor is forced (the usually spectacular James Cromwell is a bit off this film around) and some of the decisions are questionable (I’d rather see Troi getting drunk rather than being drunk) but this is an excellent film, directed expertly by Jonathan Frakes.

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME – The Enterprise crew goes back in time in order to appear in a sitcom. It really shouldn’t work given how hokey an idea it is, and how hokey some of the gags are, but VOYAGE charms you all the way back to the future. VOYAGE is Shatner’s best movie work for Star Trek because it plays to his comedic sensibilities, which are far greater than his dramatic sensibilities.

STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK – The first Trek film to really tell a good story, SEARCH is also the first Trek film that gives everyone something substantial to do; before this it’s all Kirk, Spock, and People Who Push Buttons and Repeat What the Captain Said. It loses a bit by not having enough of Nimoy-Spock and Uhura, but what’s here is very good. It’s really Saavik’s movie as much as anyone’s, and it’s a shame that the character almost completely disappears after this movie.

THREE STAR LEVEL

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN – Look, everyone loves this movie, so if you want the full rundown on why I don’t like it, click that link back at the start of this section and find out. Essentially, it comes down to this – a brilliant first half that falls apart in the second half. To never have Kirk and Khan face off against one another and instead lob photon torpedoes at each other as they scream on the phone like angry teenaged girls. This film has become my go-to example of how a story can fall apart halfway through a film. It’s a shame; the first half – especially the scenes with Khan and Chekov – are splendid.

TWO STAR LEVEL

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS – Wait, this film is my go-to example of how a story can fall apart halfway through a film. Blame it on Kirk. GENERATIONS is the first film with the TNG cast, though it’s bookended with scenes starring Kirk. The opening sequence is fantastic as Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov attend the new relaunch of the Enterprise. An emergency happens, the current Captain is a completely befuddled tool, and Kirk and Scotty save the day. Kirk dies. Fast forward to a more competent captain and we get a solid story with the TNG crew and Malcom McDowell. There’s too much Whoopi Goldberg – there’s way too much Whoopi Goldberg – and Data is at his most excruciatingly annoying, but there’s still a lot to like, despite the film force feeding us tricked-up emotional plot games. Picard’s nephew dies at the start of the film in order to make him more susceptible to the effects of the Nexus, but up until Kirk’s reappearance (or rather, until Picard’s entrance into his fancy pants Dickensian household fantasy), it’s a semi-enjoyable movie.

STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE – Slow and ponderous, THE MOTION PICTURE is far too caught up in wanting to be Important rather than Enjoyable. I bet if I rewatched it, I’d knock it down to a ONE STAR movie because it’s too dull to make for repeated viewings, but as a stand-alone film, it’s more boring than awful.

ONE STAR LEVEL

STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER – A well-meaning attempt to blend humor and adventure with some deeper philosophical issues, FRONTIER is William Shatner’s love letter to James T. Kirk, and it ends up feeling forced and hammy. There are moments so stupid you wonder why no one told him no (like the mountain climbing scene), but I don’t hate FRONTIER as much as I feel sorry for it.

STAR TREK: NEMESIS – Completely stupid, no one looks like they even want to be here. There are some nice sets on the enemy’s ship but the villains are lame and the treatment of Troi – from being telepathically raped by two different bad guys as she’s having sex with Riker, to Picard asking her to endure another session of the mind rape for the good of the mission – is completely disgusting.

UNRATED LEVEL

STAR TREK: INSURRECTION – Blame Netflix.

STAR TREK (XI): And the Big Red Superball Shall Save Us All

Star Trek (2009) – Directed by J.J. Abrams – Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Bruce Greenwood, Ben Cross, Winona Ryder, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Morrison, Eric Bana, and Leonard Nimoy.

After having watched all of the Star Trek movies (minus the Netflix-challenged Insurrection) leading up to the J.J. Abrams relaunch, I can certainly understand why long-term Star Trek fans might despise this movie.

I am not one of those people.

Abrams’ relaunch is the Star Trek movie I’ve been waiting my whole life to see, and while it is certainly not a perfect movie, it is a big, slick, fun, emotional rollercoaster ride of a sci-fi action thriller that opens with engines on full and doesn’t stop until the end credits roll. There are some holes in the plot, some missteps with characterization, but this is spectacularly good filmmaking.

Though flawed, STAR TREK is the single most enjoyable pure action movie since Die Hard. And yes, I’ve seen Drop Zone.

Having only a limited interaction with the franchise (you can read about that right here), I always found the Trek universe to be a bit cold and clinical. Maybe part of this was just me being a stupid kid and wanting to see more stuff done get blowed up, but I don’t consider that to be a bad thing if the explosions are built on and around emotions. (Nothing wrong with the occasional supercool visual, either.)

Abrams TREK is completely designed to stand on its on, forging ahead in an alternate timeline to “boldly go” and all that. There are plenty of nods to the cast and crew of The Original Series that even I could spot, but the look, the pacing, the style, and even the characters are crafted more to be contemporary and forward looking rather than traditional and building on the past.

Which, after all, isn’t a bad idea when relaunching a series that had been worn into the ground.

There’s a lot going on in TREK – far more than I want to get into in a couple thousand words – and while some narrative logic is lost to Abrams almost crippling need to keep throwing the movie forward (a move he probably would’ve pulled off in he had a compelling villain), TREK is eminently rewatchable. While the characters are mostly types instead of actual people, almost all of the actors (even that annoying Charlie Bartlett dickhead) give solid, enjoyable performances.

I should probably restate here my position that I don’t care much for comparing the movie to the source material as a means of passing judgment. It’s unavoidable, to a certain extent, but I’ve got the original stories and no new interpretation is ever going to take them away from me, so if some new whippersnapper of a filmmaker wants to radically change things, I’ll give it a look on its own merits. I’ve never really understood the animosity towards cinematic remakes, either; humanity has been doing and redoing plays for centuries, but somehow movies are sacrosanct? Why? Why does William Shatner’s James T. Kirk have to be the only interpretation of this character we ever get to see?

Honestly, I’d rather see Chris Pine do Pine-Kirk than see him attempt to redo Shatner-Kirk.

Movies are different animals than novels or comic books or television shows and if a new interpretation wants to change up what exists in that other format I’m more than willing to give it a shot.

For someone with little investment in the Trek franchise, I found Abrams movie to be a completely satisfying experience. Unlike previous movies, which often felt like longer-form television shows (especially the three-”episode” arc between Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home), TREK feels like a contemporary summer movie from start to finish with its hyper-focus on delivering thrills over character development. Abrams gives a brief nod to the childhoods of Kirk (Pine) and Spock (Quinto) but it’s done more to establish their types (Kirk the Rebellious Youth; Spock the Nerdy Loner) than it is to set up any kind of real movie-long character development.

The childhood scenes are fairly silly. In Kirk’s sequence, his pre-teen self has stolen his step-dad’s (or guardian’s) Corvette and gone for a joy ride through the lonely and dusty highways of Iowa as the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” cranks out over the car radio. It’s an odd set of audio and visuals designed to make Kirk look both like the bad boy and to give him an old-school masculinity. Abrams has cherry-picked the old school reference points – we’ve got a signature Vette from the most-classic of Vette eras (the 1950′s) and a signature song from the integration of rock and rap era (the 1990′s) – in order to craft his bad boy/future Captain. Both the Vette and the song make infinitely more sense for us than it would for someone a couple hundred years in the future – it’s not like there’s very many people in 2010 stealing their step-dad’s horse-and-buggy and cranking the medieval ballads of Tristan and Isolde.

Abrams sets this young rebel, with his ’57 Vette and ’92 rap/rock song against a futuristic cop on a sky-cycle, but Kirk wants to drive the car off a cliff as he jumps out of the car in slow-motion and The Man ain’t gonna stop James Tiberius Kirk.

For Spock’s half of the childhood portion of the film, we see him on Vulcan doing logical nerd stuff and then he gets picked on by some full-blooded Vulcans who want to pick on the small half-breed in order to get him to be emotional. So he gets emotional at hearing his mom called a whore and kicks the crap out of one of his tormentors. This leads to him having a “heart-to-logic” chat with his dad (Ben Cross), who’s all “I married your human mom because I was Ambassador to Earth and it was the logical thing to do; she was, after all, something of a celebrity, allowing me to receive a plethora of free press for Vulcan on TMZ, which is where Americans received all of their news on the important issues of the day. Our coupling name was ‘Winorek,’ and while not as popular as something called ‘Brangelina,’ we had a much higher Q rating than ‘Bennifer.’”

“I have no idea what you just said, father, but the entity known as Q has little to do with the hierarchy of culturally-driven human popularity.”

“Date a human, son. Emotions make them much better in the sack. It is a logical conclusion.”

“I fail to see what this conversation has to do with potatoes, father.”

“You will, my son. You will.”

The scenes establish them as more similar than dissimilar in their emotional make-ups. Kirk is the rebellious youth lacking in proper maternal supervision (his mom was off looking for Thor) and Spock is the rebellious youth lacking in maternal influence (his human half is suppressed). They start to diverge as Spock successfully turns to logic and academics, while Kirk turns to women and beer, but they each display a bit of what the other has in spades – Spock never quite loses his rebelliousness and Kirk isn’t fully capable of suppressing his intellect.

As actors in these specific roles, Chris Pine is much better suited to playing the hardheaded Kirk than Quinto is to playing the intellectual, aloof Spock. (This is not to say Pine is a better actor – I haven’t seen enough of them to make that decision – but that his talents are better suited to the role he’s being asked to play.) Pine has that corn-fed All-American look, and he’s able to pull off a stubborn confidence quite effectively, whether he’s getting shut down by Uhura at a bar or arguing with Captain Pike on the bridge of the Enterprise or insisting to Spock that their long-shot plan is going to work. Quinto, on the other hand, often seems uncomfortable as Spock, like he doesn’t fully have the character locked down. Maybe having Nimoy in the movie effected either his performance or the conception of the character but Spock, as a character, rarely pops in this movie. Maybe that’s what he’s supposed to be, but I was rarely moved by him.

Both Kirk and Spock have their Starfleet epiphanies depicted. In the bar scene, Kirk is hitting on Uhura when some Starfleet meat-head steps in to defend an honor she doesn’t want defended, and the Academy recruits kick the crap out of Kirk. (Kirk basically spends the entire movie getting his ass kicked, and then getting up, and then getting it kicked again.) The fight is broken up by the arrival of Captain Pike, who sits down to have a heart-to-heart with Kirk. Pike clearly has a bit of hero worship for Kirk’s dad (whom he studied for his dissertation) and challenges Kirk to step up to match his father’s legacy. “Your dad was captain of a starship for twelve minutes,” he tells the bloodied Kirk. “He saved 800 lives. I dare you to do better.”

The sequence of Kirk’s dad getting command of the Kelvin and sticking with the ship to the end as he orders the evacuation of his very pregnant wife is absolutely fantastic and more emotionally gut-wrenching to watch than anything in the preceding ten movies – with the possible exception of Nimoy-Spock’s death back in Wrath of Khan. It’s top flight filmmaking across the board and, flat-out, is one of the best singular sequences in the entire Trek movie franchise. Chris Hemsworth and Jennifer Morrison are wonderful as Kirk’s parents, and the death of Kirk’s dad contrasted with Kirk’s own birth is stunningly good.

Another highlight is Bruce Greenwood, who is, in many ways, the best part of this movie. (He’s certainly the best actor.) His Captain Pike is smart, experienced, and willing to think outside of the box. He’s all about giving people a chance to prove themselves without ever losing sight of the mission, which makes him the perfect captain for a starship whose primary mission is to explore but often runs up against.

Or, as it happens, the captain of a starship stuffed with inexperienced cadets. Funny how that works out sometimes.

Pike has enough intellectual confidence to stay focused and not get rattled but that also allows him to listen to the crazy, suspended cadet that comes barging onto the bridge with a harebrained story about a mysterious Romulan spaceship that killed his daddy. It will never happen, of course, but I’d pay cash money to watch a show or movie with Greenwood playing Pike.

Greenwood certainly isn’t an action hero, which makes him the perfect link between Shatner-Kirk and Picard and Pine-Kirk. As such, there’s not much room for him in the picture, but Greenwood makes the most of his brief screen time to get Kirk into Starfleet and then get him into the Captain’s chair.

Spock’s decision to join Starfleet comes when he’s brought before some Vulcan bigwigs to be told he’s been accepted into the Vuclan Science Academy despite his disadvantage. This gets Spock all pissy and it’s Quinto’s best scene in the entire movie; he asks the high-and-mighties if they could clarify what they meant with just the right amount of restrained anger in his voice, knowing full well they mean that he’s half-human but wanting them to say it so they know exactly why he’s turning down their science academy in order to go to Starfleet.

So Kirk and Spock go to Starfleet but they don’t interact until Kirk cheats in order to pass the Kobayashi Maru test that Spock designed to be impossible to defeat. It’s probably Pine’s best scene as he smugly goes through the test, unworried about the no-win scenario because he’s rigged the computer program to turn out in his favor. (Apparently, in scenes that were cut, this was the genesis of his interest in sleeping with She-Hulk – she works in computer programming. And the woman playing the green-skinned hussy also plays Scarlet in GI JOE: The RISE OF BILE INTO YOUR MOUTH. Which brings up an interesting question for actors – would you rather be unrecognizable in an epically good movie, or have your face plastered all over an absolute stink-bomb?) Kirk’s cheating gets Spock all uptight and bothered but before the trial can come to a conclusion Nero’s ship is all up in Vulcan’s business so everyone has to scatter to their starships and get on with the blowing up of things.

And the blowing up is impressive. The battle scenes are like nothing the Trek movies have ever attempted. When the Enterprise comes out of warp drive to find themselves in the middle of a battlefield littered with destroyed Federation ships, Abrams puts you right in the middle of it all, dodging debris, fighting the enemy, trying to survive. Finally, after ten movies, the Enterprise doesn’t just look cool, but is cool.

The final fight sequence between the Enterprise and the Whatever Nero’s Ship is Called is blisteringly awesome visual filmmaking.

Abrams does a fantastic job giving everyone something small but significant to do. Okay, so Uhura’s “something to do” is basically to stand there and look hot as dudes fight over her, but Zoe Saldana does it very well, and her one scene with Spock (who she’s romantically involved with) is pretty well done. Everyone gets a scene, something the early Star Trek films neglected. Sulu gets to jump out of a space ship and sword fight some time-lost Romulans. McCoy gets to drug Kirk to get him on board the Enterprise, and then try to make him better as Kirk runs around trying to test out his hypothesis. (It is a bit weird to give Urban the funny scenes since he’s not very funny.) Chekov gets to pull off a daring teleport maneuver. Scotty gets to, um, pull off a daring teleport maneuver.

All of the non-Kirk and non-Spock actors do a fine job of making their characters work despite their somewhat limited screen time, so kudos to the casting department.

Sort of.

Eric Bana’s Nero is a bit of a wet sock, spending most of his time sitting and moping, and the film never really capitalizes on the fact that Kirk is fighting the guy who killed his dad. For whatever reason – perhaps to show that he’s focused on the mission – Kirk never gets that scene where he tells Nero, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

There’s a whole wants-to-be-complicated-but-isn’t plot in the center of the film about how Nimoy-Spock has this big red ball of super energy that he’s going to use to save Romulus but doesn’t that results in him being imprisoned on Hoth, where Quinto-Spock just so happens to exile a dismissed Kirk. It’s the kind of coincidence that if you like what Abrams is doing, you’re just going to roll with it, and if you don’t like the movie, you’re going to roll your eyes.

I like the movie, and we get some cool Abrams Monsters and Leonard Nimoy and Simon Pegg out of it, so I’m not complaining.

All-in-all, STAR TREK is one big, slick, popcorn ride.

More, please.

STAR TREK (X): NEMESIS: Is This the Line for Residuals?

Star Trek (X): Nemesis (2002) – Directed by Stuart Baird – Starring: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Tom Hardy, and Ron Perlman.

You know STAR TREK: NEMESIS is going to be awesome the minute the opening titles roll out and they do the whole backwards/mirrored letters bit with the “R”s in STAR TREK and the “E”s in NEMESIS.

It would be one thing to pull off that “cool when we were sophomores and they finally let us in the editing suite” move if they were relaunching the franchise with NEMESIS, but this is the end of the line, and given the film’s tagline of “A generation’s final journey begins,” and the nature of the script – marrying off Riker and Troi, giving Riker his own command, killing Data – indicates the producers had to know this was it.

It’d be enough thing, too, if this was somehow a different Star Trek film, but it’s not. It’s just more of the same, except worse. There’s nothing about NEMESIS that makes it play radically different than either Generations or First Contact (I haven’t seen Insurrection because Netflix is either saving me or hating me), so it just comes off as a lame attempt to … I dunno, be kewl or something.

It’s dumb, which makes it the perfect titles, actually, for the two-hour bag of crap that follows.

I really just don’t understand what the intent of anything is supposed to be in NEMESIS. From the opening sequence with the Enterprise cast attending Riker and Troi’s wedding (the human half, at least), it seems clear that NEMESIS wants to pull off the “this is an end/this isn’t the end” move. Fine. But then it has a curious way of going about it.

First, they hear some kind of distress call and go looking for it on a desert planet where people shoot at them and Picard, Worf, and Data ride in a dune buggy. While not quite the equivalent of the ridiculous rock-climbing Kirk scene in The Final Frontier (in part because they play this straight; in part because Patrick Stewart isn’t an old fatty), it’s one of those stupid scenes that gets added to an action movie when you haven’t seen anyone shoot anything or blow up in a while. It’s like they want it to be, “See, Picard is still virile because he likes to drive fast in a dune buggy!” but it’s more like, “Hey, when did Star Trek start inserting stupid scenes with stupid things they can knock a toy out of for your local Target?”

Data is all, “I don’t understand the human attraction to going fast” or some crap that he’s always saying. At this point, why does anything about humanity surprise Data? Or if he’s still being surprised, shouldn’t it be about, I dunno, hentai? Chia Pets? People who put ketchup on Shepherd’s Pie? What a completely useless character. Or stupid. Or both. Maybe when I rewatch The Next Generation series, I’ll re-evaluate my take on him in the confines of a weekly television show, but as a movie character … just dreadful.

Worse – oh yeah, WORSE – what do they find on that dustball planet? ANOTHER DATA.

Good lord. And this Other Data’s name? B-4. They know it’s stupid because they have Picard say, “Dr. Soong’s penchant for whimsical names continues.” It’s whimsical because Soong is a genius, but it has all the ingeniousness of crazy people naming their cats after their favorite types of soup. As if to exist just to prove that Data isn’t as awful as he could be, B-4 says things like, “Why does the tall man have a furry face?” when looking at Riker.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Luckily, they decommission him pretty quick when they realize he’s a spy for Shinzon. Who’s Shinzon?

A clone of Picard.

Yup, NEMESIS is a clone story, and again, I have to wonder, what’s the point? I mean, honestly, they try this whole “Picard feels a connection to this younger version of his DNA” but he really doesn’t. Is it supposed to be a silent nod to his whole, “The Picard family line dies with me” bit from Generations? If he’s so virile with his dune bugginess, and if Crusher keeps giving him the I-Know-What-You-Look-Like-Nekkid smirk, get a room and get on with it.

Shinzon is pretty clearly a bad guy right from the start (you can tell this from both his ridiculous costume and his ridiculous name) and he generates no sympathy. Great, you were created as a Romulan plot and then discarded, forced to live on Remus in the slave labor camps. We all got it tough, Shinzon, that’s no excuse to go killing people.

If you’re going to introduce a clone in a movie like this, it would seem the best use of him would be to get the original to re-evaluate their life through the new choices and opportunities that the clone has available to them.

Instead, Shinzon is just a younger, evil Picard … except he’s not. He’s just a run-of-the-mill, lame-ass bad guy. Are we ever supposed to think this guy is Picard’s equal? It doesn’t happen. Not once.

Shinzon has a “viceroy,” who stands around, touching him when Shinzon gets weak (I don’t even want to try to explain it – he’s dying or degenerating or hurrying toward some other artificial ending the movie makers trump up in order to make the plot move faster), and he’s got a cool, evil face that looks like a leftover design from the Master on Buffy, and it’s Ron Perlman.

Look, nothing against Ron Perlman but when did he become such the go-to guy for monsters that no one else gets a crack unless Perlman’s busy? At what point did Hollywood decide if you need someone to put up an unmoving mask, get Ron Perlman. He must’ve read the script for NEMESIS and said to his agent or wife or hooker-friend, “They’re going to pay my rate for this tripe? I say, like, seven things. They do realize they could get one of the stunt guys to do all this, right? God, do I really want to work that weekend? Crappity Jones, they don’t even give this guy a name! Now I’m taking this role just to spite them.”

The Viceroy and Shinzon team up to appear in the single worst scene I’ve seen in any of these Star Trek movies – the telepathic rape of Deanna Troi. It’s a completely disgusting concept, filmed in a manner slasher films would employ, and in no way adds to this movie. It’s made doubly worse when Picard says that he needs her to endure more of these violations for the good of the mission.

This is the point where Riker should’ve got in the old man’s grill and knocked his ass down. Instead, everyone just sort of looks on blankly.

Rape, even if it’s “just” telepathic rape, is a classic bridge-too-far. This isn’t Viceroy stepping into Troi’s mind to have her think Riker got flushed out of an airlock; it’s the Viceroy forcing images of both himself and Shinzon into Troi’s mind while she’s having physical sex with her husband and replacing his face with first Shinzon’s and then the Viceroy’s, so as Riker is pumping away, she’s seeing the two bad guys. Unreal.

The sequence is a total and unequivocal game-changer, and the makers of NEMESIS treat it like it’s just something bad guys do to good guys and Troi will get her revenge when she mind-connects back with the Viceroy later on. Are you serious?

There is no payback for rape, and it is to the enduring shame of this production that the counselor – the flipping ship’s counselor – gets NO SCENE where she is counseled on this telepathic rape. Troi tells Picard, in no uncertain terms, that she was violated and wants to be relieved of duty because she feels herself to be a liability. Picard refuses, telling her that if she can withstand further assaults (!!!!), he needs her by his side. They victimize Troi through the rape, and then silence her professional voice, and then have her telepathically punch back at her rapist as if that’s some kind of logical revenge.

Where were the actors to put a stop to this? Or were they all not thinking, spending all their time sitting around the food cart noshing on slices of baked ham and lobster cakes and reminiscing about the time some broad in a Klingon costume flashed them in Prague.

Is there anything good about NEMESIS? Yeah, the starship fight between the Enterprise and the Scimitar is pretty good. In general, the look of the film is slick, although there are hilarious close-ups of the Enterprise crew pushing their touch pad control boards. Like the audience is right there with Yeoman Whoever pushing the red button, then the blue button, then the other red button.

Isn’t this exciting?

No, it’s just one big, dumb, stupid movie where everyone appears to be sleepwalking. They kill Data, but then reactivate B-4 to take his place, which isn’t at all creepy in its psychological implications.

An unfitting end to the ride of The Next Generation cast. But hey, here’s pretty some pretty CGI footage: