20 Most Messed Up Deaths From The Star Trek Movies

18. Mining Praxis

Hold on to that teacup, there's a storm brewing — the subspace shockwave felt around the galaxy, and especially on the Excelsior. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was an allegory of the end of the Cold War. The destruction of the Klingon moon was the Chernobyl disaster that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

'Praxis,' as name, is then, by definition, practice over theory, and a term key to the philosophy of Marx. "I cannot confirm the existence of…" meant the end of a certain way of doing things, and marked the beginning of another. In the analogy, Gorkon was also Gorbachev, whose Soviet reforms of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) produced a seismic shift in real-world international relations in the mid-1980s onwards. There was one major difference between the pair — a successful assassination. We'll get to that later.

In the film, the Klingons had little choice but to sit down at the dinner, and eventually, the negotiating, table. No doubt the most messed-up thing is that the end of Star Trek's cold war had to be so boiling hot. Perhaps it is our fault as moviegoers, nay as humans, that we need explosions, and plenty of death, to precede diplomacy.

According to an unused line in the script, Praxis was "barren of indigenous lifeforms". Nonetheless, the moon's "decimation" still meant the "deadly pollution of [Qo'noS'] ozone," and who knows what else! The number of victims was never given, and may never be known.