10 Best Battles In Star Trek's History
Roddenberry may have wanted a Utopian future, but that doesn't mean it didn't kick ass.
For an organisation that makes such a song and dance about "exploration" and "discovery", Starfleet rarely shy away from an honest fight. Whether you put that down to space just being a dangerous place to make a living or just humanity's inescapable love of a good dust-up is your business, but it means that Star Trek's never been more than a few episodes away from some interstellar straighteners.
Plus, and let's be honest here friends, space battles are cool.
While restrictions of the time meant that Star Trek's early outings needed to limit these effects-heavy encounters to one ship and it's glowing lasers, the tension of being stuck inside a combustible steel tin, with nothing more than an exploding bulkhead to protect you from the infinite nothingness of space, always made it great TV.
But with the digital capacity to make the battles outside as thrilling as the stories inside, Star Trek has led the way for decades in bringing space warfare to both the big and small screen. From contests between two bitter foes, to entire fleets crashing into one another, these 10 stand as the franchise, and arguably the genre's, finest moments.
10. The Battle Of The Bassen Rift - Star Trek: Nemesis
Critically panned to the point it became a Generation's Final Journey™, Star Trek: Nemesis doesn't tend to get too much love for anything these days. But through a kinder lens caused by nothing pushing this continuity forward for 19 years, there are a few bright spots.
Data and Picard's relationship transcends the themes of the TV show, Tom Hardy provides a far-better-than-its-given-credit-for performance as Shinzon, and the climactic battle sequence ranks comfortably as one of Star Trek's most epic. The Scitimar, probably the most fearsome ship we've seen in Star Trek with more than 4 angles, vs the Enterprise-E and two well-meaning but fairly useless Romulan Warbirds.
The bulk of the movie's effects budget is pumped into this fragmented but bumper conflict, with over 20 minutes of screentime elapsing between the first shots being fired and the Enterprise finally ramming itself into the enemy hull. For scope alone, as well as the constant twists in the tide of the conflict, it's an under-rated moment in an otherwise underwhelming movie.