14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek Generations
6. That The Space Battle Lasts More Than 10 Seconds
That the mighty USS Enterprise gets taken down by a lowly, ratty Klingon Bird of Prey was ironic the first time it happened back in 1984 but doing it again a decade later wasn’t just lazy, it was dumb. In The Search for Spock, it was believable because the starship was in a bad way with less than a skeleton crew, and Kirk literally blows the ship to bits to take out as many bumpy-headed space Vikings as he can. In Generations, the Enterprise-D is in perfect working order, and the only reason it’s mortally wounded is the utter incompetence of the writing and how that trickles down to the crew.
When the Dumbass, er, Duras sisters are able to get torpedoes through the Enterprise’s shields by learning their frequency, what does William T. Riker, in command of the mightiest ship class of the time do in response? He orders evasive action and to fire the phasers…which the ship does only twice. The ship then turns around while presenting a big, fat, stable target. He doesn’t think to, oh, call me crazy, change the shield frequency, or do logical things like go directly to warp and zip past the Klingons and out of the line of fire, or—to quote Nero in Star Trek 2009—”fire everything!” With so many options before him the script forces Riker to fight it out at putt putt speed just so the Enterprise can lose. Had Riker not been tossed the idiot ball he’d have ordered Worf to open up an economy-sized can of Whoop-Ass on the Duras sisters and pounded them to Klingon Come.
But nope, the movie falls back on the show’s lazy “[tech] the [tech]” trope and has them invent some convoluted way to lower the Duras’ defenses and lob one—one!!!—slow-motion torpedo at them. It’d have been far more satisfying, and less dumb, to watch the mortally wounded ship wipe the deck with the Klingons before it succumbed to its wounds.