The Next Generation 6x11 "Chain of Command, Part 2"

rating: ****

the story: Picard is tortured for information by a sadistic Cardassian.

similar to: "Balance of Terror" (original series), "The Die is Cast" (Deep Space Nine), "Kir'Shara" (Enterprise)

my thoughts: Well, ask any fan, and they'll tell you all about how this episode is a classic.  David Warner, a repeated guest presence in the franchise, is in his finest role as the Cardassian torturer Gul Madred, who matches wits with Picard in a way no other character could.  In its own way, "Chain of Command, Part 2" is Next Generation's version of the Kirk/Khan showdown from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I'll put it another way: "There are four lights!"  Those are Picard's defiant final words to Madred, uttered in a hoarse voice, which he later retracts, actually, in a humbling conversation with Troi, admitting he was on the verge of breaking.  Like Data shooting at Kivas Fajo in "The Most Toys," it's the moment fans have to keep in mind when they struggle to reconcile the Picard of Star Trek: First Contact with the more composed Picard to be found virtually in every other adventure.  This is a man of deep passion and conviction, who under ordinary circumstances ("Sarek" is another example) is in scrupulous control of himself.  That's what this episode is all about, seeing how far that really goes.  It's the ultimate test of the character.  At times he's recklessly defiant (goading Madred about allowing his daughter to see him at work), and at others, almost mocking (jabbing Madred about the helpless little boy the Cardassian once was), but make no mistake, this is Picard stretched to capacity.  It's absolutely riveting, of course. 

The whole thing is a game of chess, including Captain Jellico's second go in command of the Enterprise, as Next Generation produces its ultimate Cardassian episode, paving the way for the brilliant Deep Space Nine material that would follow.  In a way, it's the "Balance of Terror" of the series, in the way the Romulans proved to be nuanced adversaries in the original series, Madred's torture inadvertently giving Picard, and the audience, a glimpse into Cardassian culture, which turns out to be more rich than we'd seen from any other Star Trek alien species.

It'd be wrong to assume this experience couldn't be duplicated, in some ways just as brilliantly, because Garak torturing Odo ("The Die is Cast," Deep Space Nine) and Shran torturing Soval ("Kir'Shara," Enterprise) are equally impactful moments in franchise lore, if less well-known.  It's just, when you give Patrick Stewart a chance to shine, it's hard to be as memorable.  Everyone expects Stewart to be brilliant, but he has so few moments where he really has material he can sink his teeth into.  If nothing else, "Chain of Command, Part 2" is one such moment.

I think that's easy to agree with.

criteria analysis: franchise - series - character - essential (all criteria met)

notable guest-stars:
Ronny Cox (Jellico)
David Warner (Gul Madred)

The Next Generation 6x10 "Chain of Command, Part 1"

rating: ****

the story: Tensions rise between the Federation and the Cardassian Empire, leading to a covert assignment for Picard and a new captain for the Enterprise.

similar to: "The Search" (Deep Space Nine)

my thoughts: Talk about ending the first half of the season with a bang...It's almost as if the sixth season didn't really matter to the producers until "Chain of Command," which features the kind of slam-bang impactful storytelling that typified the series at its very best, the Cardassian version of the grand Klingon saga that shaped so many of the best moments from Next Generation. 

This first half is best known for the introduction of Captain Jellico, whereas the second half, which I will discuss separately, for the torture of Captain Picard.  These are equally significant developments in the story, and for the series.

Adjusting to a different style of command is as difficult for Riker as was the presence of Shelby in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1."  Jellico makes the early, stiff Picard seem like a wimp.  He immediately sets about one of the most-needed revisions of the series: putting Troi in a regulation Starfleet uniform.  Fans tend to overlook, when criticizing the form-fitting outfits of Seven and T'Pol in Voyager and Enterprise, respectively, that Troi's cleavage was easily the most provocative element of the franchise (outside of all the skimpy clothes guest characters tended to wear on alien worlds).  It also didn't serve much of a narrative purpose except to single her out as a different kind of officer.  yet she was, first and foremost, a Starfleet officer, like anyone else, so it was high time she looked the part, too.  It was all part of the maturing of Troi's presence in the series, which seemed like a project for the whole season (see also: "Face of the Enemy").

Jellico sticks out more than Shelby because he rankles not just Riker, but the whole crew.  He proves how warm a presence Picard has become over the years, and what a difference it makes when someone else is in charge.  It's also the old Star Trek trick of finding interpersonal conflict when, technically, this is the bright happy future where we all get along, which dates back to the original series.  Besides Jellico, there's also the debut of the quintessential "bad admiral" Nechayev, who would make a few more appearances in the franchise.

So "Chain of Command, Part 1" is a status marker for the whole series, right when the franchise was about to expand to include another (Deep Space Nine).  And a darn good one.

criteria analysis: franchise - series - character - essential (all criteria met)

notable guest-stars:
David Warner (Gul Madred)
Natalia Nogulich (Admiral Nechayev)
Ronny Cox (Jellico)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

1991 was a special year in franchise lore. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary. Above and beyond the failure of The Final Frontier, fans still had an abundance of affection for a cast they had followed for so many years. It would take a lot more than one bad experience to kill Star Trek again, especially now that five films and a second TV series and crew had been introduced. One final film with the original cast was warranted, and probably demanded, for the occasion, and so was released The Undiscovered Country.

It may seem like an antiquated notion to modern ears, but the Cold War was still a recent subject in 1991, and social allegory had been a common theme in the original series. The closest the films had gotten with this theme had been The Voyage Home, which had ridden a wave of environmental concern to exceptional box office success. Given the recurring presence of Klingons in the films (which had probably done more than any original series appearance to popularize them), it probably wasn’t a huge leap to connect this final film’s story with them and the Cold War’s conclusion. Doing all this was probably enough to create a more successful movie. But for fans, probably the active participation of Nicholas Meyer helped put it over.

As I’ve said before, The Undiscovered Country feels like a continuation of the story begun in the trilogy, and is in a sense therefore a continuation of it (leaving the odd ducks Motion Picture and Final Frontier forever disconnected in still more ways from fan affection). To create a separate and continuing narrative was perhaps the most cinematic as well as successful thing the original crew films accomplished, and helped create the franchise just as much as the appearance of The Next Generation in 1987 and Deep Space Nine in 1993. Even if every episode of every series had been episodic, the creators couldn’t help but bleed a certain amount of continuity, which was far more inevitable because of the work the films did than the existence of the forebear TV show. In a sense, Star Trek, before Star Trek in 2009, had already rebooted itself.

The Undiscovered Country is probably the most fully realized, complete, and fulfilling of the original crew films. Where it lacks the surprise of Wrath of Khan, the scope of Search for Spock, or the fun of Voyage Home, it offers a mature product that hasn’t aged in twenty years, the first time a Star Trek experience could say that. It is as appropriate a final statement from both this crew and their movies as it can be. Fans had long known these characters were timeless. At last one of their adventures feel like it as well.

Some of the guest actors help make it that way. David Warner, as the doomed Klingon chancellor, has one of his signature roles in the franchise. Christopher Plummer is virtually rediscovered thanks to the film. Kim Cattrell, like Kirstie Alley, enters the popular consciousness thanks to Star Trek, only to find her big success with another project. All three performances add to the luster of the final project. Brock Peters returns as Admiral Cartwright, Kurtwood Smith appears as the Federation president, Christian Slater makes a cameo (okay, so if anything dates the movie, it would be the idea that this appearance would be relevant, because his star has fallen considerably since then). A popular supermodel (Iman) costars, even! We also get the first deliberate generational crossover, as Michael Dorn is shone briefly as his own ancestor, defending Kirk and Bones in Klingon court. (Scenes not shone in the original theatrical release also bring us Rene Auberjonois, a few years before he officially joins the family as Odo.)

As with virtually every other film in the series, the passage of time is clearly evoked. That would certainly be another unique element of the films, since it’s hardly routine for films, let alone a film series, to stick with a group of aging actors. Sean Connery was booed out of the Bond films forever when he definitely no longer looked like he did in the 1960s. George Takei finally gets his wish, something that was intended as far back as Wrath of Khan, when Sulu is finally shown as captain of his own ship, the Excelsior (I don’t know if anyone has ever properly made the connections here, but he made his intentions toward this ship pretty clear back in The Voyage Home, after everyone else had already made their continuing resentments from Search for Spock perfectly clear). This was only the beginning of a new Star Trek campaign that would insist a Captain Sulu TV series would work wonderfully, an argument that probably helped give us the Voyager episode “Flashback,” which is set during this film. (Maybe then we might have found out why Sulu liked that ship so much.) That Sulu’s command is a prominent element of the movie probably felt like a reward for Takei’s years of patience, and still stands apart as the only real career progress for any member of that crew.

“Flashback” isn’t even the only episode to evoke the film. A few years later, Enterprise revisited the Klingon penal colony (and court) in “Judgment.” After “Mirror, Mirror,” no single Star Trek adventure has left as much of a lasting impact as The Undiscovered Country. A lot of other films and episodes have served as lucrative launching pads, such as the introductions of Q and the Borg in Next Generation, but without even meaning to, the sixth film has managed to become an instant touchstone. It may be because it was the final original crew movie, and so automatically sticks out in franchise lore. Sulu never did get that series. No film or series ever really revisited Klingon culture in quite that way, expansive as some of them got. I would argue that, far from having exhausted itself, as many fans were arguing by 2005, Star Trek had only scratched the surface, by 1991, by 2001, and even by 2011, even though hundreds of episodes, eleven films, and countless books and comics have explored far and wide the emerging canon. The phenomenon of The Undiscovered Country is an example of that.

I don’t remember when exactly, or how, I first saw it, much like Wrath of Khan, but Undiscovered Country was pretty easy to love, as it has been, apparently, for most fans. Aside from the allegorical implications, it isn’t quite as ambitious as Khan or Voyage Home, the other unabashed successes of the first six films, so its success is more a testament to the fact that sometimes, it does pay to have a lot of history behind a Star Trek, sometimes being good at what you’ve already done is good enough. This was the last time fans allowed the creators to get away with this kind of attitude, or experience, so it’s nice to think of the film in that regard as well. Maybe it was simply that, for a change, Star Trek was merely content to tell a good story, that allowed everyone to get along so well. It wasn’t trying to do or be anything else. With nothing left to lose, the franchise in the hands of a new generation, The Undiscovered Country was like a cruise home.

I usually rank this one pretty near the top of my list when considering the film series as a whole. Even though I have a lot of glowing things to say about some of the others, and even an emerging appreciation for Wrath of Khan, which has suffered in my mind the way The Motion Picture and The Final Frontier have for others, The Undiscovered Country will probably remain that way, a consummate experience that constantly finds new ways to entertain me. You have to love a film that finally has someone ask Kirk what the heck the deal is between him and women. Or that features the hilarious first appearance of someone named “Dax.” Or finally flummoxes Scotty with the basic laws of physics.

I don’t know, go and watch it again yourself. One final piece of endorsement: The Undiscovered Country probably also has the most distinctive and interesting of all the movie titles, as well as the feel of what the original series used to do all the time with its episodes, a trend Deep Space Nine would later continue.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

1989 saw a unique challenge for Star Trek. For the first time in its history, there would be two competing incarnations. Star Trek: The Next Generation was entering its third season, while the original series crew prepared to continue what had suddenly become a popular film series. Where the TV show was entering into new creative heights, infused with emerging voices behind the scenes that would soon take the franchise into startling new directions, the fifth film was undertaken by a combination of players who had never successfully guided Star Trek on their own. Harve Bennett always benefited from his collaborations with Nicholas Meyer, while the director for The Final Frontier, William Shatner, continually struggled against his own ego. Is it really any surprise that the result was, at least until that point, the least successful venture in franchise history?

Perhaps, as a matter of omens, the numbers worked against the movie from the start. 1989 was, after all, two decades removed from the final voyages of the original series, when the sad truth that the network, and perhaps audience, would no longer support it. And as I’ve already suggested, perhaps the fans were never going to be comfortable with the need to split their focus; this was hardly the last time they ended up rejecting one crew for another.

But not to put too fine a point on it: The Final Frontier is hardly a critical success, either. It may, even more than The Motion Picture, be the source of the Odd Number Curse, the theory that as the films go, the odd-numbered movies just aren’t that good (doesn’t help, either, that even-numbered entries Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home were such considerable successes, where none of the others to this point were). Even Gene Roddenberry wanted this one out of the canon, and as a rule, all filmed Star Trek has generally been considered automatic canon, no matter the quality of the material (after all, at the very least “Spock’s Brain” might have been the earliest example of selective experience, wouldn’t it?). Spock’s brother, who was never referenced before, and never referenced again, is a focal point of the story, after all. The dude laughs. He’s got facial hair. He’s a full-Vulcan bastard son of Sarek. And not to mention, again, that fans generally consider it one big dud.

By 1989, I was far enough along in my firsthand Star Trek experiences and memories so that the original TV ads made an impression (Scotty’s ironic statement about knowing the ship like the back of his hand still stands out). Of course, my family was never much for making trips to the cinema. We made a trip to see a re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs once, but until around 1994, it simply wasn’t a habit. I didn’t really see Final Frontier until I began to grow serious about my interest in the franchise, which is to say, well after I was aware of its reputation. It became something of a mission, but also something of a completist’s impulse. It wasn’t a question of whether I would ever watch it, but that I was going to, and so, naturally, I would have to approach it with at least something of a virgin’s perspective.

Which wasn’t too hard, because beyond the reputation, I knew virtually nothing about it, not even that tidbit about Spock’s brother. Would you think differently about that one if you knew they tried to cast Sean Connery in the role? Like the missed opportunity of Eddie Murphy in The Voyage Home, just imagine how different Star Trek would have been had it happened. I’m convinced that it’s Connery’s presence in Highlander that helped spawn that franchise. I know that Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade helps make that one my favorite in that series. This was a period in which a lot of his audience appeal had been lost, but his mere presence still gave off an incredible amount of sheen (and probably helped the starring-role resurgence of the following decade). A detail like Sean Connery as Spock’s brother would have made it instantly memorable, for audiences at the time, and those trying to catch up years later.

Instead there exists only vague impressions about Final Frontier, as if it’s not even worth remembering. The only moments worth remembering, talking about, seem to be those that evoke, as no other entry in the original crew films managed, the old camaraderie between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, the campfire scenes that bracket the main story. The rest of it is that dreaded thing a lot of the Picard films could never quite elude, the feeling that a property that had begun on TV could never quite escape the feeling that it still played like a TV show, some random and not convincingly appropriate film experience.

Therein lies the problem with Star Trek’s curious success, of course. How many other TV properties have managed to continue with the same casts on the big screen? I can think of only two other examples. The Adam West Batman series from the 1960s attempted to strike movie gold while it was still hot, and The X-Files attempted two times to transplant Mulder and Scully to film, and I would argue only ended up weakening their appeal. It still counts as bizarre and unique that William Shatner and Patrick Stewart led casts that had been assembled for television across a series of ten films. The only reason it happened at all was because of the most successful fan campaign in pop culture history, the one that saw The Motion Picture released more than a decade after the original Star Trek series sputtered out after three muddled TV seasons. That Shatner and his cast starred in six films was more a fluke than anything. That Stewart and his starred in four is, in hindsight, probably more than any other film series could have asked.

The Final Frontier, I think, is as much a case study of everyone finally starting to realize how weird Star Trek’s circumstances were as any direct reflection on its own worth. Certainly, anything after The Voyage Home that looked and acted nothing like The Voyage Home would have had a hard time, but Final Frontier had that much greater a problem because all of a sudden, the mere existence of Shatner and his cast acting in another film seemed superfluous, both as something that maybe should never have been, and because Star Trek was now back at what might be thought of as its “real” home.

To complicate all this is the fact that its reputation is not entirely unwarranted. Like The Search for Spock (or, say, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome), The Final Frontier attempts to reach beyond the kind of storytelling that is traditionally native to itself. From the opening shot of Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), the brother of Spock, riding across a barren landscape, on a horse no less, to Shatner’s mountain-climbing escapades, it’s all a lot less direct than Star Trek typically is, whether on the small or big screen. Clearly, once again, someone’s been looking at Star Wars, and wondering why they can’t be more like that. But Paradise City is no Mos Eisley. That Romulan chick is no Han Solo. (Okay, so David Warner’s inexplicably undeveloped St. John Talbot would be the Han Solo of this movie, and that pretty much explains all you need to know about that.) Conceptually, The Final Frontier doesn’t fill a lot of its holes.

Yet that’s kind of beside the point. Roddenberry himself had been attempting to do “the god movie” ever since The Motion Picture (or, that is, Phase II). The original series was littered with episodes attempting to address the divine (so much so that I left those entries out of my season recaps entirely). The Final Frontier was, in effect, inevitable. Of course, you might also say, only William Shatner could have made The Final Frontier.

I would not say that statement with sarcasm. Not only with sarcasm, anyway. The idea of it is pretty brilliant, actually, much in keeping with The Voyage Home, and certainly in spirit with The Motion Picture. In fact, you might almost say that The Final Frontier is The Motion Picture, inverted. Instead of following a crew that is in turn following an unknowable entity back to its creator, which turns out to be pretty recognizable, we follow a crew that is headed toward a supposed entity that turns out to be the opposite of unknowable. This is the kind of expansive take on a traditional Star Trek story that Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home were so successful in presenting, but it’s a formula that also misfires, as in the case of The Motion Picture. Treading the fine line of being familiar while being original, trying to evoke a television experience while attempting to be cinematic about it, it’s a combustible proposition.

The Final Frontier ends up being an entirely predictable victim of circumstances.

But since I’m talking so much about it, you can bet I did not, eventually, decide that it was as bad as its reputation suggested. I grew to love it, naturally. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s one of my favorite films, or even one of my favorite Star Trek films, but that I enjoy it, admire it, and am even inspired by it (in a good way).

Part of it may have to do with all those connections I was speaking about, especially the unfortunate associations with The Motion Picture. In addition to every other similarity, there’s the theme of deep emotional pain, which Sybok exploits throughout Final Frontier as shorthand for how he manages to gather such a following around him. He makes it known that he is not a typical Vulcan, that far from suppressing his emotions and following only what seems logical, he embraces emotions and every illogical end that seems to flow from them. Vulcans are only religious in their discipline, but Sybok seems to have taken that idea to a whole new level. It can’t be called blind obsession, either, because he believes with total conviction that he’s right, even about his brother Spock, whom he knew as deeply troubled about the warring Vulcan and human influences in his life, and this is the most subtle thing about The Final Frontier, but Sybok is wrong only in this regard, because he has not had a chance to experience the Spock who has died and come back, who has learned to better integrate the parts of himself that make him such a unique individual. There is no greater representation of Spock in the first ten films than The Final Frontier.

I know, it’s heresy to say that. Maybe it’s Spock’s philosophical conversations with Bones over “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that help define this (“life is not a dream, doctor”), I don’t know. That God turns out to be just another con artist may either strengthen or weaken the film’s impact. I think it’s exploring the idea at all, to let it soak in for an entire film, like allowing Spock, for the first time, to be comfortable with himself, even against a considerable challenge, that gives the film its unexpected heft. To have Spock suddenly have a brother is an immediate and handy way, another version of shorthand, to give the story a little added incentive, a little more overall weight. It may also be another way to undermine everything, especially if fans aren’t buying any of it, and if Star Trek then does its best to pretend The Final Frontier never happened. That’d be why it’s dangerous to walk the episodic line, in a franchise that periodically tries to walk away from it, in a film series that tries to differentiate itself from a prior or concurrent incarnation.

Whether or not you take the film seriously, anyway, clearly there are some pretty big things to think about when considering The Final Frontier.

Recently, when preparing to write this particular article, I put the movie on and listened to it mostly as a background soundtrack, and I think it’s never come off better, that when freed from a lot of the questionable visual choices, it comes off a lot better. You can imagine what it might have been with a little more experience and funding behind the camera. (You can just look at the Klingons in the movie, and watch a Next Generation episode from the same era, and notice how choices deliberately made didn’t really help matters, either.)

But The Final Frontier probably isn’t, in the end, as bad as you were led to believe. If it’s a failure, then it’s one of those noble and spectacular failures, one you can’t help but admire (if you want to). All things considered, I don’t believe, at the very least, that it deserves to be blackballed from memory, franchise lore, or canon, much less. It’s a movie of big ideas, with a lot of memorable pieces stitched together for a serviceable whole. As Kirk insists late in the film, “I need my pain.” Star Trek needs something like The Final Frontier, too.

As a concluding note, I can’t overlook the score from Jerry Goldsmith, the first one he contributed to a Star Trek movie since The Motion Picture, and the last until First Contact. Maybe it’s appropriate that once again, many of the themes he developed here would resurface later. If the soundtrack sounds familiar, then maybe that’s your way into The Final Frontier.