A Brief Guide to Star Trek

upcoming
Voyager
. While Paramount had been keen to trade on
The Next Generation
momentum with a new movie following 1991’s
The Undiscovered Country
, fans were not nearly as starved of
Star Trek
material in 1994 as their 1979 counterparts had been. This potential ‘franchise fatigue’ (the fear that there was just too much
Star Trek
available) would become a serious problem for later
Star Trek
TV shows and movies.
    The second
The Next Generation
movie (the eighth in the series overall) would enjoy a different reception upon release in November 1996, two and a half years on from the end of the series. By this time, fans of
The Next Generation
had seen enough time pass since their heroes beamed away from regular television episodes to be excited about seeing Picard and his team in action once again. In addition, this time they’d be up against one of the television series’ iconic foes, the Borg.
    Generations
had been a muddled movie, trying to achieve too much in just one film. It was yet another send-off for (some of )
The Original Series
crew, an introduction for
The Next Generation
team to the big screen, a chance for series’ icons Kirk and Picard to meet, and it had to tell a story of its own.
Star Trek: First Contact
would be different – this time
Star Trek
would be an allout blockbuster action movie.
    Rick Berman was still in charge of Paramount’s
Star Trek
franchise, and he turned once again to
Generation
’s scriptwriters Brannon Braga and Ron Moore for story ideas, suggesting he’d like to see something involving time travel. ‘All of the
Star Trek
films and episodes I have been most impressed with –
The Voyage Home
, ‘Yesterday’s
Enterprise
’, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, and I could give you half a dozen more – have all been stories that deal with time travel’, said Berman. ‘In a way,
Generations
dealt with time travel. Nick Meyer’s wonderful movie
Time After Time
, dealt with time travel. The paradoxes that occur in writing, as well as in the reality of what the characters are doing and what the consequences are, have always been fascinating to me. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun as being involved with ‘Yesterday’s
Enterprise
’, and having to tackle all the logical, paradoxical problems that we would run into and figure out ways to solve them.’
    It was Braga and Moore who wanted to bring the cybernetic Borg to the big screen. Their first attempt to incorporate the time travel aspect saw consideration being given to stories set in the American Civil War and Roman times. However, the most developed idea was for a trip to the European Renaissance for Picard and the Borg, under the title
Star Trek Renaissance
. Ron Moore recalled the story involved Picard investigating a village under siege by hideous monsters. ‘We begin to realize that these horrific monsters were the Borg. We track them down to a castle near the village where a nobleman runs a feudal society. We suspect the Borg are working in there, but no one can get in. So Data becomes our spy, impersonating an artist’s apprentice . . . Data became friends with Leonardo da Vinci, who at the time was working for the nobleman as a military engineer . . . you would have sword fights and phaser fights mixed together, in fifteenth-century Europe . . . it risked becoming really campy and over-the-top.’
    Saner heads saw the film’s setting relocated to the twenty-first century, allowing the story to explore the origins of the
Star Trek
universe through the development of warp drive technology and humanity’s ‘first contact’ with the Vulcans. Out to foil these events would be the Borg, setting out to assimilate the past. Brannon Braga recalled: ‘The one image that I brought to the table is the image of the Vulcans coming out of the ship. I wanted to see the birth of
Star Trek
. We ended up coming back to that moment. That, to me, is what made the time travel story fresh.We get to see what happened when humans shook hands with their first aliens.’
    Following the elevation of Leonard Nimoy into the director’s chair for
Star Trek III
and
IV
, Picard’s ‘number one’, Jonathan Frakes, was invited to direct
First Contact
. Frakes had the innate understanding of
Star Trek
that Nimoy had enjoyed (which gave the Paramount brass confidence), but in its more modern guise of
The Next Generation
. He had directed a variety of the show’s episodes on television, including the acclaimed