Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Wasted An Incredible Premise

At first, you might wonder what a movie is doing in a list about Star Trek episodes. Well, we do like to keep you at red alert! More to the point, as we've previously discussed on the channel, Star Trek: Insurrection has always seemed more like an extended two-parter than a feature-length. For theatres, it just didn't quite work, but it probably would have made for a strong enough outing on television.

At the movies, Insurrection was a bit bland. Whatever the moral, telling it through the prism of an interstellar band of privileged wannabee neo-Luddites made the whole thing a little difficult to care about. Insurrection was also not without similarities to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — Homeward. At its core, however, the film did have quite the premise — the rebellion against Starfleet and the Federation of one Captain Picard (and crew).

The idea of seeing the usually by-the-book Captain (look how he reacted to Ro Laren's 'betrayal') forced to turn against Starfleet and the Federation has already played out in the now admiral (retired)'s eponymous TV show. To a lesser extent, we'd also seen Jean-Luc defying Starfleet orders at the start of Star Trek: First Contact, so a full-on rebellion in the next film made a degree of sense. Insurrection could have been The Next Generation's Search For Spock, but instead of Starfleet just being 'in the way,' they would have thoroughly been up to no good.

"Saddle up! Lock and load."