A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Stewart. ‘I wish we had not had to go into the movie quite so quickly as we did. I had four days off between wrappingthe series and stepping aboard the
Lady Washington
in Santa Monica bay [for a holodeck-set sequence]. Luckily, I did not have to do too much character research’.
    A movie version of
The Next Generation
had been gestating since 1993, when Paramount had suggested the idea to Rick Berman, who’d been responsible for the show from the second season following the enforced retirement of Gene Roddenberry due to the latter’s ill health. As happened with the original pilot episodes of
Star Trek
, Berman was asked to develop two pos -sible movie stories for
The Next Generation
with two different writing teams. The writers going head to head in this friendly competition were all
Star Trek
TV veterans: Maurice Hurley, who’d done so much to shape
The Next Generation
in the early days, and the team of Brannon Braga and Ron Moore. The only rule laid down by the studio was that each story should feature the appearance of a character (there was no specification as to who) from the original
Star Trek
series. Given that Spock, McCoy and Scotty had all appeared in cameos in
The Next Generation
, the obvious choice was Captain James T. Kirk. Sulu would feature in an episode of
Voyager
two years later.
    Braga and Moore won the internal screenwriting ‘contest’. They’d prepared by watching the preceding six
Star Trek
movies, some of them more than once. ‘We watched
IV
(
The Voyage Home
) closely’, said Moore, ‘[and] we watched
The Wrath of Khan
several times, because it’s my favourite and I think the best as far as story and execution. We wanted to get a feel for how
Star Trek
translated to the big screen.’
    The writers were used to working within the limitations of television, where a space battle requiring special effects shots would be strictly limited to a couple of exterior shots, occasional phaser strikes and a lot of camera shake to simulate action. The same restriction would not apply to a big-budget movie with a different approach to special effects. Riffing on the title of one of the best-remembered
The Next Generation
episodes, the writing team of Braga and Moore set out to capture ‘the best of both worlds’ in fusing the humour of
The Voyage Home
with the highdrama and charismatic villain of
The Wrath of Khan
in their
The Next Generation
movie.
    They were also aware that popular though
The Next Generation
was on television, the
Star Trek
movies had to appeal beyond those core viewers to an even wider potential audience, who might not be as familiar with the set-up and characters of
The Next Generation
as they were with the ori -ginal
Star Trek
series. The movie had to be more of a stand-alone action-adventure story featuring
The Next Generation
characters than a tale caught up in seven years’ worth of serialised back-story and mythology.
    ‘We knew Kirk was going to be in it’, said Braga of the film that eventually became
Star Trek Generations
. ‘We knew what we wanted to do with Data. Coming up with the space-time Nexus and what the villain was up to was not a struggle. Because it is a movie you can take bigger risks with characters, because you are not obligated to do another episode the next week. We ended up with a lot of humour, but a dark film as well. The theme does deal with death: Picard suffers a terrible tragedy, while Kirk is facing profound regret. There are some sombre moments.’
    Bringing the two generations of
Star Trek
crews together was always going to be a narrative challenge. Their first instinct was to put the two crews in conflict, inspired by a draft movie poster concept of two
Enterprise
s engaged in combat. Common sense rapidly prevailed, however, when the writers discovered that coming up with a plausible reason for such a situation was more difficult than they’d imagined. They also ruled out a time travel story (something they’d done several times on
The Next Generation
, and a Brannon Braga speciality), and they didn’t want
The Original Series
characters to appear in the twenty-fourth century as ancient versions of themselves, like McCoy had in ‘Encounter at Farpoint’. It was Rick Berman who suggested a story spanning both time zones, beginning in the twenty-third century of Captain Kirk and then continuing seventy-eight years later in the world of
The Next Generation
.
    The one thing everyone agreed had to happen was a meetingbetween the