Top Five: Star Trek Week

Welcome to GBN’s first-ever theme week! In honor of the upcoming release of the rebooted Star Trek, a week of Trek-themed Top Five lists. Why? Well, all the nerdblogs do theme weeks, and the Top Five is the closest thing to a regular unning feature I’ve ever created.

Well, I guess it’s maybe my second theme week, if you count my “Marriage of a Nerd” posts from last year, but this is the first that’s not all about me.

Anyway…a week of Trek-themed Top Fives. Tonight, the easiest and least controversial of the possibilities – the Top Five Star Trek Movies (To Date).

"Spock...does this spacesuit make my ass look big?"

5. The Motion Picture: Really more an indication of how bad many of the “Trek” movies have been than anything. This isn’t really a good movie by any means – though I do give it the nod here in the slot usually reserved for The Search for Spock. Why? Well, it’s got some things going for it. It’s the only time we get to see what the aborted “Star Trek Phase II” series might have looked like – “Star Trek” in the Groovy ’70s! The strange pajama uniforms! The weird bald chick walking around in a shorty bathrobe! The freaky XO with his feathered hair and loose sexual mores wanting to do it with the weird robot chick! Spock letting his hair grow out and going to live on a kibbutz in Israel to “find himself” Vulcan to undergo the kolinahr! Uhura has an afro! Bones talks like a paranoid old hippy! And it all ends with the freaky XO finally getting his wish – “As much as you wanted the Enterprise, I want this!” -  and doing it not just with the bald robot chick, but with the entirety of V’Ger. Kinky. It’s a bit like watching a “Star Trek” movie filmed at Studio 54.

Yeah, it’s slow, it’s ponderous, it’s a fairly blatant retread of the TOS episode “The Changeling.” But it does have some ambition and some intelligence, so that’s alright. And, of course, it introduced the new-style Klingons, which would make continuity-obsessed pedantic nerds’ heads explode until it was all finally explained twenty-six years later, at which point they all just said, “Wow, that was pretty dumb.”

Data is emo.

4. First Contact: Far-and-away the best of the NextGen entries in the series. They managed to make the Borg threatening and interesting again after they had been thoroughly defanged over the last couple of seasons of the show. Picard gets to go all Cap’n Ahab and flirt a bit with Alfre Woodard and do that “Picard quotes classic literature” thing we all love so much. Data gets to be the Big Damn Hero. James Cromwell works very well as the Reluctant Hero. Geordi finally gets to take the stupid headband off. There’s a fun little cameo by Robert Picardo as the Enterprise’s EMH, and he even gets in an “I’m a doctor, not a…” line. They come up with a logical way of getting Worf back temporarily from DS9. It’s all very well-done, fun and entertaining. Nothing spectacular, but big and splashy enough to feel like a movie and not a glorified TNG episode.

Plus, it was nice to finally have an in-universe explanation for why there was always a ship around called the Bozeman.

"Hello, computer..."

3. The Voyage Home: Some of the perennial favorite TOS episodes were comedies – “A Piece of the Action,” “The Trouble With Tribbles” – so it’s a bit surprising that it took them four entries into the series to make a comedy movie. The fish-out-of-water stuff is pretty fun: “Ah, the keyboard. How quaint.” “What does it mean, ‘exact change?’” “Of course he’s a Ruskie, but he’s a retard or something!”

This is all to the good, because the plot itself is utterly ridiculous and riddled with holes. To begin with…humpback whales, in captivity? Even those few killer whales kept in captivity require a lot of space and a lot of resources – and they’re half the size of humpbacks. There’s a hilarious scene with Uhura and Chekov asking locals where the naval base is – and it’s always bugged me. Starfleet Academy is in San Francisco. Uhura and Chekov are both Starfleet officers and therefore presumably Academy graduates. They should know where Alameda is. Even the most city-centric San Francisco resident has at least a rough idea of East Bay geography. I know that the Academy’s location wasn’t established until some time later, but still…I donno. It bugs me.

Kirk and McCoy paid extra for the Special Audio Tour, narrated by Hollywood star Christopher Plummer.

2. The Undiscovered Country: A great send-off for the original cast, even if it is largely responsible for absurdities like “The Klingon Hamlet.” Still, watching Kirk and General Chang butt heads is great fun. McCoy’s withering “What is it with you?” when Kirk kisses Martia is one of DeForest Kelley’s best moments in any of the movies. Every character gets at least one great moment, in fact.

And can we talk about the assassination sequence? Killers in gravity boots beaming aboard the Klingon chancellor’s ship, deactivating artificial gravity and then going to town with their phasers? That’s great. But the fact that it’s all surrounded in drifting blobs of purple Klingon blood makes it totally awesome. It blew my mind when I was 13, and I still think it’s totally cool.

"Hold on! He's trying to go shoot another season of 'TJ Hooker!'"

1. The Wrath of Khan: Creepy space ear-worms. The Kobayashi Maru test. Captain Terrell disintigrating himself. The epic final battle. An actual understated and nuanced performance by Shatner.

And if the death of Spock doesn’t just tear your heart out – even though you know he’s coming back in a weird and contrived way in the next movie – well, you’re barely even…………yuman! then, are you? Kirk (and, again, Shatner is never better than here), forced to watch as his best friend makes the choice that Kirk refused to make, completely uncertain how to deal with a true no-win situation. Utterly brilliant.

And, of course…KHAAAAAAAN!