Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Ham City.

So. It comes to this. The disillusioned ex-Trekkie versus the worst Star Trek film of all time. You can debate Data ver 0.5, Nexuses and intelligent superprobes all you like, but very little can compete with the inanity that Star Trek V: The Final Frontier packaged in its nutty shell. Star Trek, the haven for bumblebees buzzing around port nacelles, deserved a spot in our Mutant Viewing fare, and there is no film less deserving of that honor. Nonetheless… it comes to this.

I've probably made my extensive Trek reviews a drawn-out confessional starring you as the priest, and me as the guy babbling about his demented childhood affectations for this franchise. Perhaps I should leave well enough alone, but this is a nerdy scab which will never quite heal, so long as I keep picking at it. You know that kid in school who'd peel off his scabs and then eat them? I'm sure there's a metaphor in there for me.

From around 1987 to the dawn of my college years in 1994, I subscribed to the Church of Spock. There wasn't this cool new scifi we have these days — your Battlestar Galacticas, your Farscapes, your Futuramas, your Fireflies, your Doctor Whos — in 1987 we had a choice of Trek or… well, there's always the original Star Wars trilogy that begged for another run in the VCR. Luke, you're my only hope, let's make out, now you find out I'm your sister, let's never talk about this again and go inflict war on fuzzy Ewoks.

I lived and breathed Trek like few others you would ever meet. No, I wasn't the guy who'd wear the pointy ears to school and demand that everyone call me "Lieutenant", but I was close. I had an entire bookshelf full of Trek novels, I played Trek computer games, I programmed Trek computer games, I went to conventions, bought a Klingon dagger which I kept hidden under my bed in fear of my parents ever finding out, I memorized technical schematics, I engaged (heh) in a Trek role-playing BBS game, I built Enterprises out of Legos, I knew all of the episodes by heart, and I dearly wished someone would beam me the heck out of my teenage years onto a really cool spaceship. I don't know exactly when I stopped liking Star Trek, but college helped to enlarge my geeky world in new directions, including writing stupid movie reviews that no one read.

So even bad Trek was better than no Trek at all, and I'd worn thin our VHS copies of Star Treks 1-5 by the time The Undiscovered Country came out. I think we Trekkies all dearly wished that Trek 5 would've been something other than stinky poo, but for a diehard fan of the franchise, even stinky poo is accepted and defended to the bitter end. It confused audiences everywhere, who flocked to the Leonard Nimoy-directed Star Trek IV and then shunned an unfunny and un-fun romp to the "center of the galaxy". William Shatner had no place directing part 5, no decent budget or special effects house to work with, and a clunker of a plot that deserved to die an early death in the scriptwriters' room. The lion's share of the blame rests on Shatner, who reportedly refused to play Kirk unless he was allowed to direct "the ultimate Trek film", and he wrote a movie that centered around how Kirk was [pick your outdated expression: the bomb, all that, radical to the max]. It's so bad that it's a miracle The Final Frontier didn't completely tank Trek movies after that.

It's no secret that Trek creator Gene Roddenberry hated this movie and pronounced it "apocryphal" to the canon. To this day the events of the movie — including Spock's half-brother — are largely ignored in other Trek material, buried in a Nevada landfill next to a billion Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges.

But I should probably shut up and get to the movie, taking the badness one meager teaspoon at a time, eh?

Craphole planet, aka "Nimbus III in the Neutral Zone" according to the subtitle. "The Planet of Galactic Peace". Honestly? I'd rather go vacation at "The Planet of Galactic Bubble Wrap" if peace looks like this dried up oil field. The Neutral Zone was a swath of space between the three "classic series" Star Trek powers: The Federation (good guys), Klingons (bad guys that became good guys), and Romulans (PMSing elves). There's actually a couple Neutral Zones in Trek lore, but… I'll stop there.

VULCANS CAN'T LAUGH! MY WORLD IS SHATTERED!

A scraggly man is digging in the desert for water — or a plot (ba dum dum) — when he senses a horse approaching. Horses! Just what one expects when you come to a science fiction movie! Scraggly Guy grabs his junky rifle, which apparently fires pebbles of varying sizes, but the approaching man disarms him with some smooth talk. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sybok, aka "Vulcan Jesus". He knows your pain, and wants to give your pain a big ol' hug. Sybok's on his 51st Stompin' Cross The Desert Tour in search for a few sun-maddened souls to follow him on his wacky crusade. I guess he's scratching the bottom of the barrel with Scraggly Guy, if Scraggly Guy's questionable dental plan is any clue.

The soundtrack cues up some heavy heartbeats, which signals that Sybok's working his mental mojo. "Your pain runs deep," Sybok says, and somewhere off camera Deanna Troi screeches, "Hey, that's MY line!" Sybok talks about some "secret pain" that we all hold, and if it's exposed then we become bright bouncy bunnies of joy. Gah. Double-gah. "Share your pain! Share your pain!" It's like watching a bad group therapy session where they've run out of coffee and there's only vanilla wafers left to munch on.

We might as well get into the religious subtext right now, so that we can scoot past it later, ok? Roddenberry eschewed higher religion for secular humanism, which is strongly reflected in Star Trek. Trek's universe posits that religion became outdated once humankind (and alienkind) perfected their ways and bettered themselves while still making phasers and photon torpedoes out of habit and certainly not to wage war. Sure, there were some religious cultures encountered by the Enterprise, but mostly it was of the "vague mystical Native American" variety. Any culture that worshipped a god would see said god exposed as a giant supercomputer or Spock's Brain in a box by the end of the episode. The Trek universe worships how groovy people have become, and that makes the coexistence of a higher deity difficult, if not impossible.

This naďve humanism caused issues with Trek writers, who needed flawed humanity for conflict, and instead were forced to come up with a billion hostile anomalies and alien societies that were askew and needed a good moral lecture by Picard to set things straight. In any case, it's just not a franchise that deals well with religious issues, and to center an entire movie around a messianic figure who is on a quest for "God" goes against the grain of everything Roddenberry set up in the first place. Some people might watch this movie and go "Aha! This is a blow for atheism because it destroys your preconceived notions of God!" Some people might find Kirk's final message of "God lives inside of us all" inspiring to the point of a Hallmark card. But, let's face it, most of us will just roll our eyes, no matter where we may be in our spiritual journeys. Trek 5's theological exploration is something that seems the result of a double-dog dare between Shatner and Shatner's ego.

Back to the movie. Sorry, but that way we can just enjoy the upcoming moments of Spock singing. Or, not singing. Both of it is pretty bad.

The music tells us that Sybok's cured Scraggly Guy of his depression - "It's as if a weight has been lifted from my heart!" Sybok enlists him and tells him they need to get themselves some pimp wheels (a starship). That's my attempt at being "down with the gangsters". No starships are on or apparently visit Nimbus III, for no good reason other than to create false conflict later. It wouldn't be the same movie if Sybok would've just hired a shuttle to jet his kooky ass across the galaxy, or a movie at all. Wouldn't that have been awesome? No such luck. Really, if it wasn't for this "no starships come here" line, the entire movie would fall apart. That's the level of flim that is in the flimsy plot, my friends.

Sybok laughs, reveals his pointy ears — gasp, he's a Vulcan! — which is supposed to be tremendously shocking, enough to bring goosebumps to your arm. For the uninformed, Vulcans are a Trek race that have the shining attribute of shoving all their emotions so deep inside that their outward demeanor resembles a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk. Spock was the only (half-)Vulcan who pulled off this act without coming across as an arrogant jerk, and half the time Bones was trying to spike his punch with arsenic anyway.

Questions: Why is Sybok on Nimbus III? How did he get there? Why did he go there? Answer: Shut up.

"Final" as in "There are five more sequels"

Then the titles launch at us to remind us that this movie isn't only about horses and sharing pain. It's about The Final Frontier! What could that be? I'm guessing Arby's. Nobody really knows what's in one of those restaurants.

The sun rises on Yosemite National Park ("Planet Earth", the subtitles state, in case you're thinking of the Yosemite on Planet Express), where KIRK — and by KIRK I mean "stunt double" — is being all butch and studly by climbing El Capitan with no safety gear and only a pair of jester's pants as his ally. It's only 3,000 feet to the top, which I'm sure presented no difficulty to a then-58-year-old Shatner. A mile away, Kirk's wife "Bones" McCoy is watching him through a viewfinder and muttering to himself. We might attest this odd behavior to his trendy neckerchief. "I'm a nervous wreck… If I'm not careful, I might end up talking to myself."

Spock. Superman. How come they're never in the same room at the same time? Hmm.

Ha. Get it? Ha. Because he's already talking to himself! I thought that needed clarifying.

As Kirk pauses to lord over his dominance of nature, Spock rises from out of the blue wearing his Spock-Jets. Why does Spock come with Spock-Jets as this movie's action figure accessory? The same reason that Sybok is on Nimbus III. Shut up.

Spock's rash arrival and subsequent nitpicking ("You do not realize the gravity of your situation" "You must be one with the rock") sends Kirk into a green screen nightmare of a freefall, which gets Spock all giddy. "Hooray! I get to use my new toy!" He jets down there, grabs onto Kirk, and they both accelerate and plow into the forest floor at 189 mph. Or, they're okay. I kind of blacked out there for a second. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of physics might want to pause the movie to quibble over how Spock is able to stop Kirk's fall while his jets are still angling them toward the ground, but we need to keep this truck rolling.