Star Trek: Generations (1994)

An original movie poster in 1994; the cast of Star Trek: Generations (top, L-R) Lt. Cmdr. Worf, Counselor Deanna Troi. (bottom) Cmdr. William Riker, Lt. Cmdr. Data, on the bridge of the Enterprise-D; (L-R) Cmdr. Pavel Chekov, Capt. James Kirk, Capt. Mongomery Scott, on the bridge of the Enterprise-B in the 2270's; USS Enterprise-D attempting to counterattack the Klingons; the mad scientist Soran; Soran atop a tower waiting for the Nexus to engulf Veridian III; the Klingon ship destroyed by the Enterprise; Geordi LaForge (L) and Data (R) investigating the modified solar probe in the Amargosa Observatory; the saucer section of the Enterprise-D falling to Veridian III; the Enterprise being attacked by the Duras' Bird-of-Prey; Picard in ancient maritime garb on the Holodeck at Lt. Worf's promotion; Kirk and Picard on horseback in the Nexus; Soran and Lursa; Lt. Worf and Cmdr. Riker during the Klingon attack; Picard and Kirk in a recreation of Kirk's home in the Nexus; Data trying a drink at the bar, "Ugh! Revolting! More? Yes, please!".
Summary

Released in 1994, Star Trek Generations was a transitional film, bridging the departure of Captain Kirk and crew with the arrival of Picard and the Next Generation gang. The beginning of the movie is set in the 2270's, as the USS Enterprise-B is commissioned and sent on a leisurely shakedown cruise within the Terran solar system. Captain Kirk, Scotty and Chekov are on the brink of retirement and are aboard, along with a gaggle of reporters and civilians to see the ship off. Simply flying for ceremony, the Enterprise had not been fully staffed or equipped with certain equipment such as photon torpedoes. A few minutes into the flight, the ship received a distress call from two El-Aurian refugee vessels caught in a passing energy wave. This natural phenomenon traveled throughout the galaxy, sometimes destroying ships and even entire worlds in its random path. After determining that it was the closest ship to the trapped vessels, Captain Harriman set a course to help. The energy ribbon was dangerous to approach. Pulsing with energy, the Enterprise could easily have been pulled in if it came too near. Something had to be done, as the shields on the transports were weakening rapidly. The Enterprise had to come closer in order to transport the refugees. However, this put them at risk of becoming disabled and getting caught themselves. If the ship became caught within the wave, all would perish. Dancing with disaster, the captain opted to move closer. The first and smaller transport lost their shielding and exploded before they could get into transporter range. Just before the second ship exploded, they were able to transport about a third of its crew. Many of the wounded were treated by civilians drafted for medical duty, in lieu of the ship's vacant medical staff.... not to arrive until next Tuesday. Among the refugees were a scientist named Soran and a woman named Guinan. who would later become a civilian bartender aboard the Enterprise-D. Its mission complete, the Enterprise began to depart the area. The ship was unexpectedly hit by a rogue energy ribbon, holding the ship firmly and dragging it towards the wave. Scotty surmised that a large antimatter explosion might disrupt the wave long enough for the ship to leave its grip. Photon torpedoes could have done the trick.... problem was that the torpedoes would not be stocked until Tuesday. Desparately seeking another solution, Harriman approached Kirk for good ideas. Kirk said that a burst from their deflector array could imitate the same function as the photon torpedo. Harriman said that the controls would not be installed.... until Tuesday. The captain then started to head to the lower engineering decks to activate it manually. Kirk volunteered to go instead, as Harriman's place was on hisbridge. Locating the defector controls just as the ship's shielding levels went critical, Kirk managed to activate the array in the nick of time. Slowly breaking free of the wave, everyone aboard assumed that they were okay at last. Departing the wave, the ship suddenly was struck by another energy ribbon, powerful enough that it took out a large chunk of the port-side lower engineering section, but not enough to drag the vessel back in. Damage reports began flowing in, later indicating that the deflector controls in the engineering section was one of the destroyed areas. Attempts to find Kirk were in vain. He had been lost to space.....

Seventy-eight years later, the senior crew of the USS Enterprise-D were actively participating in a promotion ceremony aboard a reproduction of an ancient sailing ship within one of the Enterprise's holodecks. During this time, Captain Picard was contacted on a secure channel from Earth, that his brother and nephew had perished in a house fire. Despite stuggling with the news, he continued to participate in the event. The joyful occasion for Lt. Worf, who was being promoted to the rank of Lt. Commander, was cut short a few minutes later, when the senior staff were recalled to the bridge as the ship approached the Federation Amargosa Observatory. The station had been brutally attacked by some unknown force. Sending down an away team, several dead Romulans and their equipment were discovered, as well as a lone surviving scientist, an El-Aurian by the name of Soran. Soran claimed that he did not know why the Romulans had attacked. Analyzation of the Romulans' tricorders indicated that they were scanning for trilithium, a highly refined and hard to manufacture material that could be used for an array of uses, including weapons and explosives, a material that was not used or permitted in the Federation. Stumped, the Enterprise officers wondered why the Romulans would look for the material aboard the observatory.

As the investigation continued, Data and Cmdr. LaForge met in Data's quarters. LaForge was the android's best friend and in some ways his physician as well, since LaForge was the ship's chief engineer. Data expressed his desire to have emotions, something that he was not originally programmed to have. Several years before, his creator, Dr. Noonian Soong, had fashioned an emotion chip for him, but his 'brother', the android Lore, also created by Soong, stole the chip for his own use. Eventually Lore was tracked down and dismantled, and the chip given to Data. Seeing how much trouble that the chip caused to others around him, Data had kept the chip locked away in his quarters for the past several years. Missing the warmth of emotion, Data convinced LaForge to reinstall the chip. Immediately Data had access to a full range of emotions and seemed more human in behavior. The next day, Data and LaForge were ordered to more thoroughly investigate the station. Bubbling with laughter, Data soon discovered a locked door, sealed magnetically and impervious to all scans. Bypassing the door mechanisms, the door opened to reveal a room containing several modified solar probes. The interior of the probes could not be scanned and LaForge attempted to open the probe's access panels. Dr. Soran appeared seeming to help LaForge. Knocking LaForge unconscious, he then aimed his phaser at Data. Now terrified, Data pleaded with Soran to spare them both. At the same time, Soran launched one of the probes towards the Amargosa star. The Enterprise attempted to shoot down the surprise probe, but failed. The sun immediately collapsed into a supernova. Seeing that LaForge and Data had not returned yet, an away team was transported onto the station to find them before the station is destroyed by the supernova. Starting a firefight with Soran, Soran took LaForge, transporting them both to a Klingon Bird-of-Prey that had decloaked just off the station. Retreiving Data, the Enterprise away team beamed back aboard. The Enterprise accelerated to warp speed just a few second shy of the shockwave.

The Klingon Bird-of-Prey was commanded by two Klingon sisters, Lursa and B'etor Duras. The Duras family was once a powerful force within the Klingon High Council. Several years before, the family had tried to take over the government and then started a civil war. The Duras would have succeeded in defeating the government had a Federation force under Captain Picard's command not intervened, exposing and cutting off their secret supply line from the Romulans. Cast off as renegades, the sisters now without their once glorious, but now deceased brother, had begun hatching plans for another takeover. Along the way they met with Soran, whose research into trilithium explosives was infinitely valuable to them. Back aboard the Enterprise, Picard and Data were in the Stellar Cartography, putting together evidence generated by Soran's destruction of the Amargosa star. Asking the ship's computer to compile a list of every thing that was affection by the supernova, Picard stopped at the note of another Federation vessel having to 'make a minor course correction' due to the intense shock waves that had altered the gravitational forces in the area. At the same time, an energy ribbon identical, if not the same that the Enterprise-B had encountered in the 2270's was traveling to the region. Picking up on this and the fact that Soran was still at-large and likely to attack another star, he asked the computer to project what would happen if Soran destroyed the next closest star, in the Veridian system. The projection turned out that the energy ribbon's course would take it straight through the uninhabited planet of Veridian III. Picard was mesmerized by Soran's intent and began to look back through the history files to learn more about Soran. He and his senior officers discovered that Soran had been a passenger aboard one of two transports that had been caught in an energy ribbon eighty-six years before. They also discovered that the ship's barkeep also hailed from that famous incident that killed the legendary Captain Kirk. Questioning Guinan about Soran, she decribed how the energy ribbon nearby was not just any random energy ribbon, but one that had endured all these years. The ribbon served as a gateway to another realm where 'time had no meaning' - where people could live their lives over, or travel freely to other times, other places, even halt the progress of time. People who have been within that realm do not ever want to return to their former lives, to realty. Most of the survivors of the El Aurian transports successfully put the energy ribbon, dubbed the Nexus by the El Aurians, out of their minds, when they knew that it was impossible to return to it. Most ships that approach the Nexus are destroyed before reaching it. But, she noted, that if Soran was still obsessed with returning to the Nexus, he wouldfind a way. Immediately Picard realized that this was what Soran had been doing all along. Soran had most likely been planning this for years, developing the trilithium to detonate stars. The ensuing shockwaves would force the Nexus into an altered course. The last course correction would be made after the destruction of the Veridian star, which would obliterate the entire system, including a populated planet, Veridian II. The Enterprise immediately was set on course to intercept Soran and his deadly missile.

Arriving in the Veridian system, the Enterprise scanned the area. The Klingon vessel was nowhere to be seen, possibly cloaked. Repeatedly hailing the Klingon ship and combing the area around Veridian III, it received no answer. All the while, the Enterprise scanned the planet's surface to locate Soran's missile staging area, but in vain. A special shield below deflected all scans. Lying under cloak, the Klingons hatched a plan to return LaForge, the Enterprise's chief engineer. LaForge had been blind from birth due to a birth defect and had used a device to assist his vision. The device was also capable of detecting electromagnetic, radio and other communication waves, not seen to the normal human eye. The Klingons and Soran modified the device to transmit optic signals to their ship, essentially to see what LaForge was seeing. They were hoping that at some point LaForge glance at information regarding the Enterprise's weapons or shielding systems, information that may give them a hand in defeating the Federation's flagship. Uncloaking, the Klingons threatened to hold LaForge hostage longer. Seeing that LaForge was in need of medical treatment, Picard offered to become their hostage in exchange, provided that they transport him first, unarmed, to talk to Soran. Picard was hoping to convince him that there were other ways to reach the Nexus. LaForge was then returned. After leaving sick bay and going through his quarters, LaForge began to roam the ship. Unaware that the Klingons had modified his eyepiece to transmit his field of vision, he soon arrived in Engineering. After checking various ship's systems, he happened to glance a second's worth at a panel displaying the vessel's shield operating frequency. This was all that the Klingons needed. Swiftly dropping their cloaking device, they opened fire. Caught by surprise, the Enterprise raised shields, but with futility. The Bird-of-Prey's plasma bolts shot through the shielding on the hull with devastating results. Within minutes the warp nacelles and warp core were off-line and on the brink of breaching. Throwing aside all questions of how the Klingons had obtaining the classified information, Commander William Riker turned to the Klingon Lt. Worf on the Bird-of-Prey's tactical weaknesses. An antiquated ship, its cloaking device could be switched on by means of a generated ionic pulse. Due to the enormous power demanded by a cloaking device, a ship cannot fire weapons or raise shields. There would a small window of opportunity to disable or destroy the Klingons, as a fully cloaked ship would be almost impossible to detect. Generating the ionic pulse, the Klingons began to cloak, dropping their shields. Firing every weapon, the Duras sisters and their ship were no more. Even though the one of their enemies had been eliminated, the Enterprise crew could not afford to take it easy. The warp core had been slowly building towards a breach. The core ejection system had been knocked offline. The crew were hurriedly evacuated to the saucer section of the vessel, the largest, forward section of the ship. The ship was separated and the saucer departed away from the dangerous stardrive section. Equipped with a sublight impulse engine, the saucer could not get a safe distance away when the warp core blew. The engines were disabled, and the ship slowly veered toward the planet below, landing fairly level-wise in a jungle with the ship in pieces and some injuries.

Picard spotted Soran and his missile launcher nearby in the rocky desert. Soran's supplies were spread out in several areas, around small gullies and boulders. He approached, only to strike a forcefield. This alerted Soran to his presence, who, despite knowing that Picard was here either to talk him out of it or by physical force, was secure by the fact of the forcefield. Bored, Picard waited, throwing stones at the forcefield. Ignoring him, Soran continued with his work. Picard soon discovered a flaw in the forcefield. A boulder bridging two smaller rocks limited the extent of the forcefield. Tossing a pebble through in the gap beneath the boulder, the fact was confirmed. All the while Soran had not noticed. Picard tried to talk Soran out of the launch, but Soran soon disappeared over a hill. Seizing the opportunity, the captain started to pull out rocks from the gap, enlarging the hole. Soon it was large enough to crawl through. Almost through the hole, the boulder dropped slightly, enough to lightly pin Picard, disrupt the forcefield and alert Soran, who took aim and destroyed Picard and the boulder, or so he thought. Noticing the approaching energy ribbon, Soran shot off his rocket, causing the star's supernova and altering the ribbon's course just in time to change course and engulf the planet.

Picard arrived in an old-fashioned house with a woman and children. There was a Christmas tree and decorations throughout the home. The children and woman greeted him, one as her father, one as his uncle and the woman as his husband. He had no wife, no children in real life and now no nephew since his recent death on Earth and assumed that this was what the El Aurians called the Nexus - a paradise reality where anything, anytime, was possible. He spent some time with them, enjoying it all. Going to a window, he looked out into the falling snow. Seeing the reflection of the Christmas tree in the window, he noticed how each shiny ornament reflected a star going supernova. He realized that despite how much he wanted to stay here, in this warm and fuzzy fiction, he had a job to complete in the past on Veridian III. Just then Guinan approached him. Picard wished to know if he could leave the Nexus in physical form and upon learning that it was possible, told her exactly what place and time he wanted to go back to. If he leaves, he would not be able to return. He needed some help to take down Soran and wanted the barkeep to come with him. She declined, but referred him to someone who might. In a flash Picard appeared at a house surrounded by a heavily wooded forest. A man was outside splitting logs. He recognized him as the legendary Captain Kirk. Greeting him, Picard pitched his mission to Kirk at once. Kirk replied that he himself had only arrived in the Nexus, and upon hearing that his 'death' occurred eighty-six years ago, he retreated into the house to think. Overwhelmed with memories, Kirk expressed joy, and realized that the home was from his past, the day that he had proposed marriage to his wife. His girlfriend called out from bed for breakfast, which only reinforced that fact. Making eggs, he ran upstairs as Picard further explained the urgency of hismission. The bedroom changed into a stable and Kirk looked outside and saw a woman on a horse on a distant hill. He realized that it was his uncle's barn in Idaho on the day further in his past when he first met his girlfriend. The two mounted horses and rode out into the countryside. Further fascinated by the Nexus, Kirk remarked to Picard that it would give him a chance to live his life over, to do things right from the first day. Riding the horse over a ravine, Kirk instantly changed his mind. In real life, jumping over that ravine scared him terribly. Since this was an alternate realty, there was no danger, which did not feel right to Kirk. The realty that the Nexus projected was simply not the genuine thing. They departed the Nexus, arriving near Soran's platform on Veridian III.

Soran began crossing one of the few metal bridges that crossed ravines in his compound. Tinkering with the missile's remote control launch pad, he noticed Picard ahead of him. Kirk went behind him, blocking his escape. The scientist hurled himself into the shallow ravine, snagging his clothing onto a rock. The remote control fell below. The remote was needed to uncloak the launcher to disable it. Retrieving the remote, Kirk sped off towards the launcher. By this time, however, Soran had freed himself and was playing cat-and-mouse with the duo. While Kirk was crossing another bridge, Soran came out of hiding, shooting and halving the bridge. The remote control fell and snagged on twisted metal at the end of the bridge section. This section of bridge was too steeply angled downward to retrieve the control, but it could be reached from the other bridge half. With Picard's help, Kirk was pulled up. Kirk then scrambled to the other side while Picard kept Soran occupied. Inching down the bridge, Kirk finally reached the remote. Pointing in one direction, the remote was able to decloak the missile. Picard immediately went for it. Kirk's weight coupled with the and angle of the bridge half put stress on the bolts holding the bridge to the rock face. The bridge let go and tumbled into the ravine below. Picard had already started tinkering extensively with the missile pad's controls when Soran appeared. Armed, he ordered Picard to leave. Picard set the launcher lock the missile's holding clamps, and scurried away. Seeing that the Nexus was approaching, Soran went up to the launcher and started the launch cycle. By the time that he noticed that the missile was locked down, it was too late. The rocket exploded on the launch pad, taking Soran with it. The Nexus harmlessly passed overhead, missing the planet and continuing on its way. Locating Kirk within the mangled wreck of the bridge, Picard heard Kirk's last words, 'It was fun.' After burying Kirk in a shallow grave, he was picked up by shuttle to the wreck of the Enterprise-D in a jungle on the far side of the planet. As was the rest of the crew, he picked up what little personal effects were left including his charred family album. Data found his cat, which thanks to his emotion chip, gave him joy. The crew were evacuated onto three Federation ships, and they would get a new ship in the next movie........









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