The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek VI: 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.