14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek Generations

14. The H.M.S. Holodeck

Between 1979's Star Trek—The Motion Picture and the 2009 reboot, the various and sundry Star Trek movies were always middlingly budgeted affairs, as Paramount knew they typically pulled in a bit north of $80 million US, and a movie’s box office has to at least double the film’s budget just to break even.

But movies aren’t TV episodes, so it was necessary to spend some of the film’s budget to open things up beyond TV scope. So we got the introductory sequence featuring The Next Generation crew on an actual sailing ship merely on the weak pretext of dropping Worf and Crusher in the drink and to establish Picard’s romanticism of the past. As such, it ends up a pointless, gratuitous sequence that isn’t half as charming as it thinks it is.

Worse, it exemplifies a problem that permeates every TNG cast movie: that it caters to fans at the expense of a broader audience. Does Worf’s promotion matter to the story? No. Does the holodeck? Nein. Do the Duras sisters? Nyet. All appear only for dedicated fans and mean nothing to the casual viewer. And the more they did this, movie after movie, the fewer causal viewers they were going to get.

Dumb.