Trekspammin'

Watched Star Trek: Generations last night with my brother. I had forgotten how disappointing it is—a pair of iconic, titanic captains meeting should not have been so disjointed, with Kirk wandering around ignoring Picard and Picard chasing him along waving a frying pan and whining about how they have very little time to save everyone.* But then, neither captain was at the top of his game in this movie. Picard came down with a bad case of a writer who clearly sided with the antiPicard fanboys who think that diplomacy is for wimps, and for god’s sake the great Captain James T. Kirk’s big contribution to the climax is to trip on a rock and die.

Also, it occurred to me that Picard could have saved a lot of meaningless time trying to convince Kirk that they were in trouble. All he had to do was remember that, if the original series is to be believed, above even the Prime Directive is the Super Duper Secret Kirk Omega Directive, which is: “If it’s too good to be true, blow it up.” So all he’d have to do to get Kirk’s undivided attention would be to say, “Can’t you see this is paradise?” and Kirk would have cried “PARADISE?!” and then he would have Polish hammered the Nexus out of existence. I mean, given the first Enterprise’s track record of Enterprise: 18 Paradise: 0, it should have been an obvious way to push his buttons.

On the other hand, Brent Spiner is wonderfully creepy when Data gets the emotion chip. Data’s Fisher Price My First Panic Attack is worth the whole movie..


*Which always confused me, because Time Had No Meaning in the Nexus. They could have gone on a two-week cruise in the Bahamas and still gotten back five minutes before Malcolm McDowell destroyed that solar system.