- 5 months ago
The original Star Trek crew's final adventure redeemed the franchise but still suffers from dumb.
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00:00The critical and box office failure of 1989's Star Trek V The Final Frontier was almost the
00:06final installment for the original series' crew movies, but with Trek's 25th anniversary in 1991,
00:12Paramount was eager to cash in with a better swan song. The resulting The Undiscovered Country aims
00:18high with its end-of-the-Cold War allegory, moments for all the regular cast, an innovative
00:23zero-gravity assassination sequence, characters facing their various prejudices, a scenery-chewing
00:29performance by Christopher Plummer as Klingon General Chang, and a tense cinematic space battle
00:35intercut with a second assassination plot. What's not to like? Well, for all the pluses, there are
00:41minuses. In addition to some heavy-handed and arguably out-of-character bigotry, and literary
00:46quotes laid out with the subtlety of a photon torpedo, there are also some things that are just
00:51plain dumb. So, with all that being said, I'm Bree from Trek Culture, and let's discover 10 of the
00:57dumbest things in The Undiscovered Country. Number 10, Mighty Morphin Moronic Martia.
01:04Camiloid Martia says that her shapeshifting takes a lot of effort, and she's part of the plan to set
01:09Kirk and Bones to get killed while trying to escape, which means she knows the Klingons are coming,
01:15so why is she so stupid as to take the form of one of the assassination targets right before the axe is
01:21about to come down? And when the baddies arrive, why doesn't she shapeshift into something else when a Klingon
01:27commandant shows apparent confusion? Doesn't she have enough Mighty Morphin Mojo to do so? And if she
01:33doesn't, then it's doubly stupid that she took on Kirk's form in the first place. Furthermore, in all three of the
01:39other forms we saw her in, she spoke in her own voice. So then why did she choose to imitate Kirk's voice
01:45while doppelganger-ing him? And when the chips are down, why not revert to her own voice? No witnesses!
01:52The script makes plain that the commandant knows who he's shooting, but as played, he appears confused,
01:58which makes Martia's behaviors appear not just dumb, but hopelessly thick. We suspect this whole
02:05business exists entirely to have the whole Kirk getting vaporized shot for the trailer.
02:10Number 9. Officer thinking, start your drinking. Kirk. Would you and your party care to dine this
02:18evening aboard the Enterprise with my officers as guests of the United Federation of Planets?
02:25After Klingon Chancellor Gorkhan accepts, Lieutenant Valeris offers. Valeris. Captain, there's a supply
02:31of Romulan ale aboard, it might make the evening pass more smoothly. Kirk. Officer thinking, Lieutenant.
02:38And yeah, about that. How can Kirk possibly believe Romulan ale will make the evening go more smoothly?
02:45Intoxication tends to lower inhibitions and loosen tongues. Or does Kirk think getting hammered will make
02:51him personally feel better and damn the consequences? It's not as clear as is played in Star Trek II,
02:57The Wrath of Khan, but Romulan ale is supposed to be an instant drunk, which explains Kirk's odd
03:03change of expression on first sip. And here you thought he was reacting to the taste. Instant drunk
03:09or not, in a precarious political situation over a formal dinner with an enemy of 70 standing years,
03:15how could anyone possibly see loosened inhibitions as a good idea? It doesn't help that the scene is edited
03:21badly. So number eight, holy ozone. Spock. The moon's decimation means a deadly pollution of their ozone.
03:30They will have depleted their supply of oxygen in approximately 50 Earth years. Say what? What does
03:36pollution of their ozone even mean? Is it akin to the human produced chemicals responsible for the
03:42Antarctic ozone hole in the late 20th century on Earth? If so, such depletion increases the amount of
03:48ultraviolet radiation that reaches a planet's surface with corresponding physical ailments and
03:53genetic and immune system damage. But it doesn't deplete oxygen. It comes across like they just
03:58tossed a word salad from some environmental lingo heard on a news report of the era. And yeah, I can
04:04attest to that having a degree in that field. This makes no sense. This makes no sense at all. This is a
04:10case where they definitely should have dropped the buzzwords and said something more science fictiony and
04:15direct. Like that the resulting subspace shockwave caused tremendous and lasting environmental damage,
04:22requiring them to move the entire population of the planet, Kronos, to another world. This isn't even
04:27technobabble. It's just dumb science. Number seven, the Viridium Patch. From the film's premiere,
04:35fans complained that there's no way the Klingons would send Kirk and Bones to the Gulag in their Starfleet
04:40duds complete with the viridium patch that Spock coolly stuck to Kirk's jacket as they left the
04:46bridge. But this is actually somewhat believable and has earthly historic precedent. Under the terms
04:52of the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war cannot be stripped of their uniforms, insignias, etc. And there
04:58was some controversy at the Nuremberg trials when accused Nazi defendant uniforms were stripped of
05:03insignia and medals. As such, it's not unbelievable there's some Organian peace treaty or whatever terms
05:10which would allow Kirk and Bones to stay in their monster maroon uniforms. The thing that is unbelievable
05:16is that the Klingons would not go over these duds with a nanometer tooth comb looking for anything out
05:22of the ordinary. Do they not notice that Kirk has the thing stuck to his shoulder? Something absent
05:28from Bones' uniform and any other they've ever seen? Would this not be seen as even a bit suspicious?
05:35Or did Kirk tell them it was some fuzzy metal? And how is a patch of fuzz detectable at a distance of
05:42two sectors? Also, does Spock just happen to keep one of them at ready in his pocket at all times?
05:48Ready to slap on Kirk at the event he does something impulsive? The original series often portrayed Spock
05:54as an all-purpose Swiss army knife, but this is really pushing it. Number 6. Gravity Boobs
06:02One of the film's most striking sequences is the zero-gravity assassination of Chancellor Gorkhan.
06:08As good as the sequence is, it's got some stupid stuff in it and we're not talking about the pink
06:13blood. Kronos-1's artificial gravity is knocked out by the second photon torpedo hit and in Chancellor
06:19Gorkhan's stateroom he and two aides immediately, but slowly, drift out of their chairs and one's weapon
06:26conveniently pops out of its holster and spins off. What's wrong with this picture? First of all,
06:31absence of gravity is not negative gravity. Unless these men pushed off against their bolted down
06:37chairs, the table, or the floor, they'd pretty much stay put. Same goes for the holstered weapon.
06:43Friction would have held it in place. Second, if they were concerned about free-floating helplessly
06:48around the room, they ought to have just grabbed ahold of the seemingly fixed table. And if they sense
06:53betrayal, deliberately push off and try and get to the nearest door and escape. That these boobs just
06:58flail about helplessly shows no smarts at all. Interestingly, one of the two aides in the stateroom
07:04with Gorkhan somehow manages to get outside of that room by the time the assassins arrive,
07:09and they phaser his arm off on their way in. If he could do that, then why did Gorkhan and his other
07:15aides just hang around? Near the end of the sequence, some unidentified Klingon pushes a random
07:21button on a wall and the gravity snaps back on. Was it that easy? Did he have a role in the
07:27conspiracy to delay switching the gravity back on until the assassins beamed away?
07:32Because if there's no inside man, what would have happened to the assassination had the Klingons
07:37managed to turn the gravity back on sooner? Finally, who beamed Burke and Samno to and from
07:42the Klingon ship? Valeris was on the bridge. Can the transporter be programmed to beam people out
07:48and back one remote signal? Great sequence, though… it's still dumb.
07:53Number 5. Cloaking Plot Devices
07:56Spock. Gas. Gas, Captain. Under impulse power, she expends fuel like any other vessel.
08:03We call it plasma, but whatever the Klingon designation is, it is merely ionized gas.
08:09Uhura. Well, what about all the equipment we're carrying to catalog gaseous anomalies? Well,
08:14the thing's gotta have a tailpipe. And thus, utilizing surgically altered photon torpedoes,
08:19the Enterprise is able to hit General Chang's invisible prototype bird of prey and, with the
08:24Excelsior, blow it to kingdom come. Exciting. But, does it make any sense? Fans have long pointed out
08:31an error in the narrative that it's Sulu's USS Excelsior that's established as cataloging gaseous
08:37planetary anomalies. They're right, but it's not the screenwriters being dumb. A brief deleted scene on
08:43the Enterprise contained this dialogue. Gorkhan. Your research laboratory is most impressive.
08:49Kirk. Starfleet's been charting and cataloging planetary atmospheres. All vessels are equipped
08:55with chemical, analytic sensors. Which would've made clear that it wasn't just Sulu's ship which
09:01had equipment on board, but that's not the problem. The real issue is it's clumsy. Nothing anyone does in
09:08the story works as a setup for this. In fact, it feels like someone imagined a way for a torpedo to
09:14hone in on a cloaked ship, then went back and put in a couple throwaway lines to rationalize it.
09:19It doesn't show our heroes being smart by figuring out a solution based on things that have happened
09:23in the story. They're just handed a solution that Spock conveniently remembers when the narrative
09:29requires it. It doesn't feel earned. And in a franchise sense, the dumbest thing here is that
09:34it took so long for anyone to think about tracing a cloaked vessel's exhaust in the first place.
09:39Number 4. Intercom Idiocy
09:42Chang. I am as constant as the Northern Star. McCoy. I'd give real money for him to shut up.
09:49You and me both bones. What McCoy really should be questioning is just how Chang's voice is getting on
09:55the Enterprise's ship-wide public address system in the first place. And in the second place,
10:00why can't Ohura switch it off? Any comm system open enough for an outside force to broadcast through
10:05to your crew is a serious flaw and breach of ship safety. If they can force signals into your comm
10:11system, they could flood it with noise to interfere with valid orders being given.
10:15Number 3. Lost in Universal Translation
10:19Since the 2009 Star Trek film, Ohura has been depicted as a polygot with an affinity
10:25for languages. But this wasn't the case in the original series or the movies with the cast.
10:30She was, as they used to say, a radio man. Her expertise was demonstrated to be with communications
10:35equipment, not with languages. So it makes sense that she wouldn't necessarily know the Klingon
10:41language, especially with the Universal Translator handy. In this film, she must communicate with some
10:46Klingons at a listening post and fool them into thinking the Enterprise is the freighter Ursva.
10:51Doing so with the assist of eight of her shipmates, including Scottie and Chekhov,
10:55and not employing the aforementioned Universal Translator. Well, sorta. On a screen, she's looking
11:01at the Universal Translator translating Klingon into Federation Standard, aka English, but for some
11:07stupid reason, the reverse isn't true. An off-camera and obviously dubbed line by Chekhov claims a
11:13Universal Translator will be recognized as an excuse. So, is its translation less believable than a bunch of
11:20people paging through ancient textbooks fumbling for the right thing to say? Okay, fine, maybe the
11:25Universal Translator has some tells that can be detected, but why not have it spit out a translation
11:31that you can check against the books? Or, hey, given someone, presumably Valeris, altered the databanks to
11:37show they'd fired torpedoes, why not say that someone has sabotaged the Universal Translator and it only
11:43translates to Pig Latin. Honestly, that would be less dumb than the scene that we got.
11:49Number 2. Space Battle? What's Space Battle?
11:53Let's consider the Enterprise's pummeling by Chang's Bird of Prey on approach to Camp Kitomer.
11:58They're representatives of the three major powers present, Federation, Klingon, and Romulan,
12:03which suggests at least three spaceships brought all these people to the planet. Where are they though?
12:08And how is it that none of those ships spot the renegade and implicated in Gorkon's assassination,
12:14USS Enterprise, racing towards the planet and then inexplicably being hammered by photon torpedoes?
12:21And then the Excelsior shows and gets similarly hit. Does no one see any of this? Undetectable
12:27firewall-cloaked Bird of Prey aside, two Federation starships bearing down on these secret space talks
12:33ought to have been spotted by someone. Were the only ships allowed to come to the conference unarmed
12:38civilian space liners that either all landed or warped away? Does the Kitomer outpost have no means
12:44of detecting ships in space? Or is it a dumb oversight on the part of the filmmakers? We're gonna go with the
12:50last one. Number 1. Starfleet Groupthink? One of the least believable things in the first six Star Trek
12:58movies is that seven members of the crew have stuck together for 20 years with only two exceptions,
13:04largely staying in the same roles and at the same damned stations for all that time. Those exceptions?
13:11Chekov went from navigation to weapons and defense in the motion picture and then served as first
13:16officer on the USS Reliant in The Wrath of Khan, but by the third film was back navigating at his old
13:22post. Sulu never budged from the helm until his sixth movie where he is inexplicably the captain of the
13:28Excelsior. But six movies in, Uhura is still opening hailing frequencies, Scotty is still making the ship
13:34go, and Chekov is still plotting courses and substituting Vs for Ws. It all feels static. The
13:41static dynamic gets even more preposterous in the undiscovered country where we learn that with the
13:46exception of Sulu, they are all going to stand down in three months. The lot of them, Kirk, Spock, McCoy,
13:52Scotty, Uhura, and Chekov are all going to be decommissioned seemingly at once. Why? They didn't
13:59all join at the same time. Their officer commissions weren't all issued at once. The story treats them
14:04as if they're joined at the hip as some fixed unit which cannot function unless all parts are there.
14:09It doesn't really make sense why they're all exiting the service at once. The real reason, of course,
14:14is it's the actor's retirement from their roles being literally reflected in the narrative and that's
14:20kinda dumb. And those are the 10 dumbest things in Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country. Did we miss
14:26anything dumb in The Undiscovered Country? Let us know in the comment section below. If you enjoyed
14:31this video then go ahead and give us a like and subscribe to the channel if you aren't already.
14:36You can find us on Twitter and Blue Sky at TrekCulture and on Instagram at TrekCultureYT. You can
14:42also find me across various social media platforms by simply searching TrekkieBrie. And with all of that
14:48being said, I hope you all have a great rest of your day and don't forget to live long and prosper.
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