253 Episodes, 10 Movies, and Counting…
“Star Trek: Nemesis” Gets One Thing Right
The Final TNG Movie Goes For Spectacular and Gives Us Sad
A Movie’s Own Nemesis
Oh, Nemesis.
I surprised myself when I realized that I can’t be one of the many people who say that Star Trek: Nemesis is the worst of the Next Generation movies. For as much as it got wrong (and oh boy, it got a lot wrong), it felt like a movie, with high stakes and consequences (unlike, say, Star Trek: Insurrection, which felt like a mid-series Next Generation season finale, which is not the compliment a movie should receive).
If Nemesis had a decent story to back up those high stakes and consequences, it might have even been a good movie.
For the Sake of Darkness
The fourth movie of the Original Series era, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, showed us a franchise full of life and future, bold and brash enough to combine time travel, comedy, and environmentalism (I mean, whales!). There’s nothing about the fourth movie of the Next Generation era that evokes anything reminiscent of where the Original Series was at that comparable point. After the lightness and inconsequence of Star Trek: Insurrection, a change of tone wasn’t unwelcome, but Nemesis swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it went for darkness for the sake of darkness, and you just can’t do that.
Central to this conceit of “darkness” is that Jean-Luc Picard looks in a mirror and sees the bitter and hateful reflection of his Reman clone Shinzon. But after seven seasons and three movies of getting to know Picard, Shinzon’s insistence that he and Picard are the same become gratingly meaningless. Patrick Stewart puts in a typically good performance, and a young Tom Hardy has a menace to him that makes him a decent adversary to Picard, if not exactly an equal one. We know Picard better than that, so despite the movie’s insistence, there’s no point during Nemesis that really feels like the story is a battle for Picard’s soul.
Darkness for the sake for darkness.
To B-4 or Not to B-4
The other conceit of that ill-advised darkness is the sacrifice of Data.
Data’s death is touching and tragic, but that’s more because we got to know the character so well over seven years of the Next Generation television series, than it is because Nemesis told a worthy story for his sacrifice. Was Nemesis the story to kill off Data? Much as Nemesis wanted to be The Wrath of Khan for a new generation, the TNG movie had none of the emotional resonance of its Original Series counterpart; while Spock mind-melding with McCoy was a key moment in the men’s often antagonistic relationship, Nemesis throwing an unheard-of prototype Data at us so we could have a feel-good ending, a cheap copy of Spock’s katra surviving in McCoy, felt insulting.
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It wouldn’t be the first time that a Star Trek movie went to The Wrath of Khan; it’s understandable, if disappointingly predictable (and predictably disappointing) for a franchise to mine its golden goose as much as possible; and it should come as no surprise that the results were underwhelming.
And yet, for as much as I can rail against Nemesis for all its squandered ideas, I’m pulled back in because holy shit, those space battles.
Socks and Ships
Look, we can all agree that movie installments of a franchise that had its origins as a television show rarely really get at what made the TV series great. Even Star Trek: First Contact, by far the best of the TNG movies, shaved a lot off what made the Borg episodes so good. And Nemesis, as we all know, dropped many balls in trying to get back to the darker tones of First Contact and The Wrath of Khan.
But if I’m going to watch a movie, I want my socks blown off. Insurrection didn’t do that. Generations didn’t do that. The Undiscovered Country did that. The Final Frontier had a terrible story, but it had the Enterprise finding God; I mean, COME ON. And Nemesis, for all its faults and flaws, somehow managed to do that with the Enterprise getting the shit kicked out of it by the Scimitar.
That’s why, as I said before, I can’t be one of the many fans who understandably condemns Nemesis to the scrap heap of Star Trek. The movie gave us a real sense of the Enterprise-E being pushed to its limits; the main viewscreen is destroyed, the auto-destruct is knocked offline, there are no more photon torpedoes left to fire, and all Picard can do is literally throw the Enterprise at the Scimitar. After Generations didn’t do anything with the Enterprise-D except destroy it, and First Contact and Insurrection didn’t do much with the E, it’s surprising that the much-maligned Nemesis is the movie that gives us our money’s worth with the Next Generation’s big-screen ship.
Enterprises and their Enemies
But as much as the Scimitar battle keeps Nemesis above water, it still reminds me of Star Trek: Generations, where the destruction of the Enterprise-D in that movie was a waste. Much as it’s still ridiculous that the D was brought down by the Duras sisters, Shinzon is such a one-and-done villain that the E getting ripped apart at his hands seems like a waste.
Look at the destruction of the Enterprise-A in The Search for Spock. We never saw Kruge again, but Kirk’s hatred of the Klingons became its own character that lasted across movies, and was given a good resolution in The Undiscovered Country. Against all of that, the loss of the Enterprise-A had resonance.
Entertaining as it was to see the Enterprise-E taken to its limits, there’s no argument to be made that that ordeal comes close to the loss of the A (or how the A suffered at the hands of Khan in The Wrath of Khan), especially since it was clear that Nemesis was the end of the road for the Next Generation.
Yes, there were conversations about a fifth TNG movie, but I don’t think anyone seriously thought that the TNG movie franchise would continue past Nemesis. There was just no gas left in Star Trek’s tank in 2002, so all the high stakes and consequences that Nemesis gave us — Shinzon’s certainty that Picard would become like him, Data’s sacrifice to save his crew, and the damage that Enterprise-E sustained — felt hollow, pointless.
The Fall of a Generation
So that was Star Trek: Nemesis, the last movie of the Next Generation movie era, and a sign of a franchise running on fumes. We got the Romulans on the big screen (finally), but they were quickly shunted off to the side. Troi got violated again. And somewhere in the bowels of the Enterprise, the Reman viceroy is, presumably, still falling.
Star Trek loves its Shakespeare, so maybe the best epitaph for the Next Generation era comes from Macbeth; Nemesis, he might say, is a tale told by an idiot (Marina Sirtis’ words, not mine!): full of space battles and dramatic speeches about destiny, but signifying, ultimately, nothing. Just the lingering disappointment at how a great generation left the stage.
