AG Monday!
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!
The last of the Star Trek movies with the entire original cast, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country saw the return of Nicholas Meyer in the director’s seat. Not only were there high hopes for it to exceed the low bar set by the previous movie, but expectations were high for this finale. How did it succeed as the capstone on original Trek? As a Cold War metaphor? As an environmental metaphor? As an opportunity for Christopher Plummer to chew the scenery even more than William Shatner? Come with us back to 1991 to find out.
Detente! Mysteries! Conspiracies! More David Warner! The passing of the torch! The Enterprise’s kitchen! It’s all here.
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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Glad you brought up the rationale of an empire falling and dying because one natural catastrophe, no matter how massively super catastrophic it was.
Trek writers or show runners don’t grasp what an interstellar empire, or nation, or union, or Federation is. I say this because death of empire by natural catastrophe gets brought up again and again. not sure on TOS, past Trek VI, but in TNG there’s the Tkon (T’Kon??) Empire in season one*, which fell and died when “their sun went nova.” Then there’s the same thing with the Romulans in season one of Picard. Though here, at least, not all Romulans vanished off the face of the universe.
So, when will Earth’s sun go nova and end the Federation? Next movie? 😀
I’ve also got this peeve about being topical, especially in science fiction. So, Chernobyl in SPAAACE! Soviet Union Collapse in SPAAACE! Gulags in SPAAACE!
All that said, it was a pretty good movie.
Oh, the British show with the ugly puppets was, I’m 99% sure, Spitting Image.
40 minutes left on the podcast for the drive home, or maybe the errand pending for midday.
*First time the Ferengi showed up.
@Kathy: I do like the movie (as evidenced by the podcast), but yes, it does require overlooking a number of scale issues for the plot to work.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I can enjoy a movie or show or book, and ruthlessly mock some parts.
Suppose someone nuked DC. Just that city and no others. Would the US collapse and all Americans in the rest of the country, and everywhere else in the world, die and be gone forever?
The second part of the question is absurd. The first is that any surviving federal officials, like cabinet secretaries, Representatives, or Senators who might have been out of town that day, or who otherwise survived the attack, would do their darndest to reconstitute the government.
On the matter of a military/scientific organization, perhaps the closest parallel is some of the voyages in the age of exploration. This was before the scientific revolution, though. Columbus and Magellan, and others, did bring along some scholars in addition to sailors and soldiers in some of their famous voyages. But that was more in an ad hoc basis than as a policy matter.
I can see if interstellar travel is expensive (which doesn’t seem to be the case in Trek), and if scientific expertise is necessary for certain missions, and likewise military expertise, that the functions of both could be combined for exploring and mapping the galaxy. But it might be more like a complement of civilian scientists along the ship’s military personnel.
On the issue of being topical, latter audiences may not recognize the significance of it. Or, as Victor Hugo is reported to have said “If I wrote only for my time, I’d have broken my pen long ago.”