The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Th original Star Trek crew's final adventure redeemed the franchise but still suffers from dumb.
The critical and box office failure of 1989's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was almost the final installment for the original series crew movies, but with Trek's 25th anniversary in 1991, Paramount was eager to cash in with a better swan song.
The resulting The Undiscovered Country aims high with its end of the Cold War allegory, moments for all the regular cast, an innovative zero gravity assassination sequence, characters facing their various prejudices, a scenery-chewing performance by Christopher Plummer as Klingon General Chang, and a tense climactic space battle intercut with a second assassination plot.
What's not to like?
Well, for all those plusses there are minuses. In addition to some heavy-handed and arguably out-of-character bigotry and literary quotes laid on with the subtlety of a photon torpedo, there are some things that are just plain...dumb. In the rush to get the film launched before the conclusion of Star Trek's 25th anniversary year meant — as with the similarly rushed Wrath of Khan script — that not everything in The Undiscovered Country's story got a second look, or even a second glance, that it might've needed, and the resulting film ends up being both smart and stupid in varying degrees.
Let's discover the 14 dumbest things in the Undiscovered Country.
14. Two-Dimensional Thinking
When the Klingon moon Praxis explodes, The Undiscovered Country depicts a rather two-dimensional energy wave that manages to hit the starship Excelsior dead on. Think about how amazing it is that the Excelsior and the energy wave just happen to meet in the vastness of space.
As Douglas Adams once wrote, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” If the Excelsior had been positioned only a few thousand meters higher or lower in space, the energy wave would have missed the vessel completely.
That damned planar shockwave was stupid then and it's remained stupid in practically every instance it's been employed since, in Trek and elsewhere. Star Trek Generations doesn't get a lot right, but its depiction of the spherical wavefront that destroys the Amargosa station is dead-on. The only way you'd get a planar wavefront as depicted here and a hundred other places since is if the blast was primarily channeled out a gap between two surfaces (think the Death Star II explosion in the Special Editions of Return of the Jedi, where such a blast wave emerges from the equatorial trench…and there’s still an explosion that goes out in all other directions).
Science dumb.