10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

10. The “Nebula”

I’ve groused about Trek’s comic book portrayal of space in the past, but the so-called “nebula” (identified as a “Nekro Cloud” in Cinefex Magazine #148) here takes the cake. It’s dumb as a box of, well, rocks. It’s not a nebula; it’s a freaking wall of asteroids.

Even as an asteroid field, it makes no sense. Gravity works, and a bunch of giant rocks moving slowly about one another are going to gradually congeal into larger and larger bodies. There’s no way they’re going to remain a set of rocky “chompers” a la Galaxy Quest. To paraphrase Gwen DeMarco’s assessment from that film, someone on the Enterprise should have said ” I am not doing it! This movie was badly written!” 

Chompers aside, a point is made that it takes the Enterprise to go through this barrier because it has the best navigational system in the fleet. So how do our heroes get the beat-up, comparatively ancient USS Franklin through without a hitch?

And this hazard is so dumb it’s no barrier at all. Once the Enterprise arrives on the Altamid side there are stars visible in almost all directions, which means this isn’t some rocky bubble around the planet, it’s some preposterous “wall” suspended between Yorktown and the planet. But if we don’t suffer from “two-dimensional thinking,” then the obvious solution to this so-called barrier is just to fly around the damned thing, making the entire premise false.