10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

The film’s “Eureka!” moment is the one where the reassembled Enterprise crew devises a solution to Krall’s Swarm, each character pouncing on what the previous person said with another piece of the solution. It’s a common enough gimmick in “caper” stories. But how they come to their conclusion makes zip sense.

Uhura’s realization “They weren't jamming us, they were talking to each other,” leads Spock to (logically) suggest a “disruptive communication signal” might affect the Swarm’s capacity to coordinate. Great, but what makes Scotty think a very high frequency will do the trick? Why does Kirk jump from that to the very specific VHF bandwidths — which, as electromagnetic frequencies go, are fairly low, despite the name? And how does Sulu make the flying leap that doing so “could cause a chain reaction that would wipe out the whole swarm”? Why does Kirk conclude it needs to be loud and disruptive when we’ve seen no sign that the drones are affected by sound? Finally, from where in thin air does Uhura happen to come up with 57.7 megahertz specifically? (Which would have been in the old analog TV broadcast frequency range of VHF in both the US and UK.) I’m not the only one who questions this.

Virtually none of this is set up, despite plenty of opportunities to do so. It could have been. And here you thought I was going to grouse about the “beats and shouting” songs.