7. The Enterprise Shouldn't Be A Lemon
I don't hold much stock in books about writing, or inflexible rules about how to write. I will say this: when writing a story, you can make a joke about something fans love, but you can't turn something fans love into a joke. You'll lose 'em every time. And the Enterprise is turned into one hell of a bad joke for the entire length of Star Trek V. Very little works on the newly constructed and poorly assembled Enterprise-A. This leads to a distinct lack of boldly going throughout the film, something that Star Trek V desperately needed. I'm not against the Enterprise leaving spacedock before it's ready. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol played with the notion of characters depending on technology in stressful situations, only to get a one-way ticket to entropyville. But that movie had interesting solutions to its technical problems. Here, it merely pads the movie with unnecessary jokes that Paramount requested after the success of Star Trek IV. Also, it removes the Enterprise's ability to use the transporters, which would've solved every conflict in the story. And yet, they handled the rules of beaming - and how Trek's writers have to bend them - better than Star Trek Into Darkness, where I'm pretty sure Sulu once said: "We can't beam Khan up, sir! He's in Europe and we don't have an adapter!"